re:assemblage collective

sada [regroup]

Sajjad Abbas, Ali Eyal, Sarah Munaf, Rijin Sahakian, Bassim Al Shaker
Iraq · 2022 · 54'00

From 2011-2015, Sada, an online and in-person ad hoc art school, was set up in Baghdad to support artists working through the aftermath of US-led invasion and occupation. Nearly a decade later, former artists of Sada came together again, reflecting on their creative and disparate lives since that time. Artists Sajjad Abbas, Bassim Al Shaker, Ali Eyal, Sarah Munaf, and Rijin Sahakian each created video works, comprising one experimental, interconnected anthology film on individual and collective art practice in a protracted era of international warfare.

Using street footage, narrative, and documentary, Sajjad Abbas’s Water of Life tracks its filmmaker’s urge to forge protest that is bigger than himself, following monumental artwork, migration, and the return to place and protest. In Ali Eyal’s The Blue Ink Pocket, a mysterious letter from an artist is authored to communicate the futility of describing violence in full, its scattering of meaning, and the power it derives through its lesser understood perpetrators and permutations. In Journey Inside a City, shot in Iraq, Turkey, and Ukraine, Sarah Munaf layers her experience as a sculptor and as part of a threatened community of artists and residents in Baghdad, and, later, as a refugee finding her way in coastal Turkey as her parents navigate life in Ukraine. In Barbershop, stop-motion animation, cutout drawings, and first-person storytelling give shape to the artist Bassim Al Shaker’s memory of his own kidnapping and its impact on his personal and creative life in the years that followed. Taking moments from popular and political culture during the 1991 Iraq war and the second invasion of Iraq, Rijin Sahakian’s Anthem argues against the use of multinational warfare in its varying methodologies—from technology to the arts—to extinguish life. (e-flux)

Sajjad Abbas is a multidisciplinary artist. Born in Baghdad, he graduated from the city’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2014. Since 2011, Abbas has created many graffiti works in Baghdad and has worked on almost ten films in the art department at the Iraqi Independent Film Center, where he was also a student. In addition to videos and films, he has completed two independent animation films. In his work, Abbas both creates and participates in political and social satire, protest, and community activism.

Ali Eyal was born in The Forest, Small Abandoned Farm. He lives and works in no home yet. After earning a diploma from the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad in 2015, he studied from 2016 to 2017 at the Home Workspace Program, an independent study program launched by Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon. Eyal’s work explores the complex relationships between personal history, transitory memories, politics, and identity, using a variety of mediums, with a focus on drawing transformed through other artistic modalities, such as text, installation, photography, and video.

Sarah Munaf graduated from the Baghdad College of Fine Arts, Baghdad University in 2011, with a focus on sculpture and painting. She completed an MA in Sculpture in 2013. Her work explores form as one part of Iraq’s long history of production and formal education, and experiments with new forms of composition and storytelling. Munaf uses everyday objects as holders of history and as vehicles for a range of communal and personal experiences. She lives and works in Turkey.

Rijin Sahakian has written and developed programs focused on Iraq as a site of prolific engagement. Her work responds to formations of American political, military, and cultural life through propaganda disseminated to enable global violence in Iraq and to diminish Iraq’s long-standing experience of, and resistance to, these extraordinary conditions. Sahakian received an MA in Art and Politics from New York University, founding and directing Sada, an arts education initiative for Baghdad-based students (2010–15) soon after.

Bassim Al Shaker is an Iraqi artist based in the United States. Bassim was born and raised in Baghdad during a period of political conflict and humanitarian torment. He received a BFA from the Baghdad College of Fine Arts, Baghdad University with a focus on drawing and painting. His style is the culmination of a background in academic drawing and painting techniques and the exploration of contemporary art. Bassim obtained an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.