Compact Home Project Compact Home Project

It takes thousands of years to build a civilisation, but only minutes to destroy one. In 1991, Mahmoud Obaidi left his native Iraq, a nearly 7,000 year old civilisation torn apart by war. His works respond both to the loss of his homeland, and to the role of art in visualising and re-creating this sense of home and its dissolution.

For the Istanbul Biennial, Obaidi is showing three works that respond in a personal manner to the recent history of Iraq. His installation Compact Home Project is an archive full of sketches, newspaper clippings and other ephemera that he has collected since leaving Iraq. The protective folders, made from metal and mesh dividers, in which they are presented suggest that the artist is trying to safeguard his re-configured documents from warfare or destruction.

Meanwhile, two large-scale ink and mixed-media paintings – Make War Not Love. Chapter 3, 2013 and Make War Not Love. Chapter 4, 2013 – conjure the recent memory of war and loss of home, and the artist’s experience of violence. The paintings use an associative imagery of animals, figures and trees, each tinged with the idea of homeland, against a stark black background. Like a mind-map of interlinked memories and spaces, and recalling the style of Louise Bourgeois’s series Femme Maison, the rendering of geometric shapes suggests the tumult of fragmentation and destruction, as well as relocation; Obaidi’s works not only mourn that which has been broken or lost, but also employ art to move on and even attempt to reconstruct it.