Shafiq’s Garden

Dia al-Azzawi (Baghdad, Iraq, 1939; lives and works between London, United Kingdom and Doha, Qatar). A socially and politically committed artist, al-Azzawi focuses on human conditions as well as the history and politics of the Arab world. His work is nourished by popular culture and folkloric mythologies, contemporary wars and the violence embedded in the history of Iraq. From Mesopotamian literature to contemporary politics, the artist’s body of work is an artistic response to both the human capacity to build civilizations and to our power of destruction.