Baghdad Café (The Coffee Shop) (2016) by FAISEL LAIBI SAHIDalloul Art Foundation
Iraqi artist Faisal Laibi Sahi started a series of paintings entitled Baghdad Cafe in the 1980s and continues to revisit it to date, this being the latest addition in 2016.
The artist drew inspiration from a 13th century illustrative manuscript known as Maqamat Al-Hariri. It was a social satire written by Iraqi storyteller Al-hariri and vividly illustrated by late Baghdadi artist Yahya ben Mahmoud al-Wasiti.
The Baghdad cafe presents the cafe not only as a communal space but also as a platform for social satire. Sahi stages key figures that represent different classes of Iraqi society. He shows them smoking hookahs drinking tea refreshments and socializing.
His work is a perfect depiction of Iraq's social stratification structure. You can see the religious and military men and intellectuals mingling together as well as members of the working class represented by characters such as the tea boy, the shoeshine boy and the fisherman behind.
Sahi's characters engage with various types of print media. While some read Sumerian mythology such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, others read the history of religious traditions in islam like the religious man holding the Sahih al-Bukhari book.
Some simply follow current affairs like the traditional Arab man cloaked in an orange “galabia” reading the newspaper. Zooming into the newspaper we realize that the headlines read in Arabic. It's a critique on the islamist group ISIS (or Daesh) who have lately destroyed and looted archaeological sites in Mosul, Iraq. This wide range of reading materials hints at a diversity in intellectual curiosities within the Iraqi society.
Each character in the Baghdad cafe has a costume or a specific headdress. While turbans adorn the heads of religious men, the "kufiyyeh" and the "agal" covers the head of traditional Arab men. Some young men rub the kefir around their head as a symbol of arab solidarity or as an artistic twist. Members of the bourgeoisie wear a fez or "tarbouche". Highly educated individuals and government officials wear the sidara or "faisaliya", first implemented by King Faisal I of Iraq as a national headdress in the 1920s.
Through this broad figurative depiction, there is one single woman, pictured in the far left, veiled by a black chador. Conservative as she seems, she is hesitant to step into an obvious patriarchal society. As you see, costumes play an essential role in Sahi's work.
In this work, Sahi hints to Iraq's recent political history through hidden visual codes. Amongst all the collection of household memorabilia, we notice a ceramic teapot, on which the artist painted the picture of Abd al-Karim Qasim. He was an Iraqi brigadier who with his troops was behind toppling the Iraqi monarchy in 1958.
It is strange that the artist depicts the religious and military man with glass eyes. Could it be that the artist is asking us to question their perception, their vision and hence their credibility?
