Plan for Greater Baghdad

Ala Younis
Born in Kuwait in 1974.
She lives and works in Amman, Jordan.

Artist, curator, and writer, Ala Younis distributes her creative efforts among films, installations, printed editions, and exhibition projects. Through her work, she addresses current situations through the lens of historical phenomena in a variety of ways. How can one measure the impact of certain events on ideals, efforts, and discourses that have repercussions on so many different times and geographical locations? Typically, Younis combines “vintage” found objects with historical archives and presents them as testimonies of her research on political leaders, cultural personalities, and utopic architecture to analyze how they impact society as a whole and how they affect the private lives of individuals.
With her installation Nefertiti (2008), a name derived not only from the royal wife of Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten but also from a well-known brand of sewing machines— symbol of emancipation and modernity in Egypt during the 1950s—Younis presented a video and five Nefertiti sewing machines, referencing the failure of President Nasser to nationalize and modernize Egypt after the revolution. On a grander scale, her installation Tin Soldiers (2011) arrayed on a tabletop 12,265 miniature soldiers, hand painted in the military outfits of Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Turkey. The number represented the exact number of soldiers in the nine Middle Eastern armies.
Since 2013, Younis—who is an architecture school graduate— has been developing Plan for Greater Baghdad, based on a 1955 urban planning commission project in Baghdad. The original project invited proposals from several major Western architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier. Younis is focusing on Le Corbusier’s proposal for an Olympic city, which was never built; only a gymnasium was erected, in 1980, as a posthumous project. Through critical investigation, interviews, and archives, Younis is documenting Iraq’s new ambition for modernity, which was suddenly aborted mid-way.
In seeking to foil certain cliches of representation in the context of Pan-Arabism, Ala Younis presented her installation An Index of Tensional and Unintentional Love of Land in the group exhibition Here or Elsewhere at the New Museum, New York (2014).