A New Body of Iraqi Artwork

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Starting from the first few weeks, new artworks were produced, much of it within Tahrir Square itself, to document and represent this episode in the protests, which were now taking place in large parts of the country, including in Basrah, Karbala, Najaf, al Hillah Kut and Nassiryah. The artwork produced attempted to describe the social and political world in Iraq but also in their locales through their creative expressions. Artists as we come to understand through interviews and an exploration of the art itself were thus not onlookers but active participants in a protest movement, a perspective that was widely echoed by the artists themselves. They saw themselves as social actors and producers of public knowledge. They engaged in interpreting the present and reimagining Iraq through art. 

Through their individual contributions, a collective archive of art about the 2019 October but more broadly about Iraqi life and its everyday challenges was borne. Many artists attempted to map through their artwork the key trajectories of the protest. This dynamic relationship, between the rapid sequence of events that unfolded from October 2019 and the content nature of the body of artwork produced in response are visible in the collection of visual images in this research. As an outcome of those developments on the ground, artists were constantly negotiating their colour palates and content and styles in ways that represented protests as they evolved rapidly within a short period of time. Significantly, this was a period of learning and engagement and celebration in ways that young generations had not previously experienced, especially as sites of protest served as a place for communication and exchange where protestors but also artists could speak to each other in ways that were not previously possible.  

Artists’ negotiation of these protests was expressed in manifold ways and could be explored through the way cultural signifiers – the use of repeated images and symbols - of those events were used in visual art. The protests as a public event were hence also significantly about projection and the attempt to influence Iraq and its politics, albeit in ways outside the formal political system. The uses of key cultural signifiers within the emerging social space that was crafted, often negotiated in varying ways by different artists, is testimony to those attempts – whether it be in reframing Tahrir Square’s Freedom Monument as an iconic symbol of the protests or the celebration of the so called ‘Turkish Restaurant’ building that protestors took over that overlooks the Tigris river or in ways in which the three-wheeled Tuk-Tuk vehicle that ferried injured protestors to places of safety was depicted. The Tuk-Tuk was famously drawn with a front-facing Assyrian Lamassu, a winged bull which artists used as a symbol of power and resilience. This study explored those cultural signifiers as an integral component of symbolic power to understand common themes throughout the October 2019 protests. 

Iraq’s protest artists - some of whom were participating in person or were from further afield or now within the diaspora outside the country - were engaged to varying degrees in bringing forward change that October 2019 protests aspired to realise. An artist is thus broadly defined here as someone who makes art to describe but also respond to the world around them. Indeed, there are no set national or international criteria of what an artist is and if there were it would ultimately be exclusionary and contestable. Rather, an artist is someone who engages in cultural production, a definition that means art production is not merely the domain of those who have been trained professionally or who have an art related qualification. On the contrary, some of the most innovative art shown in this project were by non-professional artists who saw that their work could shape the protests to realise the movement’s goals. Photographers too who were interviewed are considered here as artists as they attempted to capture and document the everyday realities within sites of protest. 

Iraqi Protest Art sheds light on a historically significant period where recognised and established or hitherto relatively newcomer artists participated in representing a turbulent and politically fragile period. The October 2019 protests, constituted by youth and their desires for political change, was unique in that most artists were themselves of a similar age group as the rest of the protestors and were, as a discernible group of artists, more directly involved in political protest than at any other period in Iraq’s modern history. This non-elitist idea of an artist describes a significant number of the artists referred to and interviewed in this project, many of whom at the time of the protests were under the age of 35. 

The protest’s de-centred mobilisation and the fact it was organised by youth groups facilitated access and widespread participation. Its power as a social and political force was its in ability to be accessible to a large swath of Iraqi society. The artwork herein looks at the ways saw the Iraqi protests as a major site for expressing their artwork and who sought similarly to being noticed and recognised by wider society. Iraqi Protest Art tells the story of people’s art representations of life in Iraq in general and the protests which marks a fundamental shift in the production of art in Iraq which has been dominated historically by established and professionally trained artists. Whilst public oriented art has traditionally been the privilege of political and cultural elites, the protests afforded new opportunities for aspirant young Iraqi artists to participate in shaping Iraq’s political discourse. Many were unknown to the public but sought to engage in cultural production through those recent events. Their role was more closely tied and a response to political activity and represents a new form of activist art that was comparably different to those previously produced by Iraq’s cultural elites in previous decades. 

Protestors took it upon themselves to paint murals in Tahrir Square and adjacent areas in Baghdad and in places like al Nassiryah in Southern Iraq to reshape the physical environment as much as to represent protestor voices. Those images, particularly the murals of Tahrir Square and elsewhere, represent forms of expression that are ultimately about an artist’s personal journey in a situation of political instability. Public spaces including the underpass in Tahrir Square were some of the first sites of public art and depict diverse representations in what became part of the artists collective will for change. Using public walls to paint images and representations of Iraq’s protests signifies resilience and resistance. It points to the use of art to appropriate public space and depict an alternative vision of Iraq. 

Art in Iraq’s protests conveyed much more than what could possibly be understood from an individual artist’s work. It represents a powerful reminder that art during moments where change is sought or indeed is seen to be possible is much more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, artists’ collective artistic production represents a powerful form of symbolic power (Bourdieu 1989) that has the potential to convey messages and resonate the energy of protests far beyond sites of protest. Indeed, Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power offers a useful lens with which to understand the relationship between cultural production in its various forms and protest as intimately connected. 

As a corollary, this study is concerned not only with the aesthetics of art but with the processes that gives rise to art production. In this sense, symbolic power is not an ‘end’ point of action but an entry point into exploring constitutive processes that can help explain configurations of power. This project is thus prepared with a view to situate art production as a particular form of politics whose orientation is focused on the transformation of society. These public forms of artwork are in this sense about people’s actions or more specifically in Iraq’s case an instrument of the weak and marginalised. As such, we were interested less in engaging in discussions about elitist and hierarchical categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures than art production’s relationship to power and politics. 

In a context of their roles as artists who sought to depict protests but also transform and engage in society, this study views artists as engaging in the production of public debates. Rather than viewing and assessing individual artists as intellectuals – which is a futile endeavour in a situation of violence and upheaval – we consider protest art an indispensable collective force that is unique in society. In this sense, the body of artwork that came into being from October 2019 constitutes a semblance of public intellectualism as it grappled with society’s key problems and engaged in politics. Although the purpose of the project is not to frame or engage in debates about whether Iraqi artists of different skills and backgrounds are public intellectuals, especially as their very goal was oriented to contributing to Iraq’s political and social trajectories, it is better to situate artists within the moments and locales of the protest environment that the demonstrations gave rise to. In this sense, this project focused on the cultural production of a specific period and the collective intellectual spirit and organisation that emerged but which had come to a gradual halt because of violence visited on protestors. 

Whilst this study does not contrast protest artists to Iraq’s elite-oriented cultural ‘thinkers’ – a section of society that has similarly been marginalised by conflict and political ruptures – we see this latter group in Iraq, who constitute in part Iraq’s educated though degraded middle-class groups, as primarily concerned with reproducing statist cultural repertories and practices that have been inherited from decades of state-funded cultural production. Significantly, Iraqi protest artists have little if any direct connections to state institutions such as the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Antiquities, conferring upon them a great deal of freedom and autonomy. 

Whilst underlining the major structural challenges that have led to protests, this study focuses on the lived experience of Iraqi artists as seen through their participation and contribution to the 2019 October protests and the artwork they produced. I chart protests and its significance in Iraqi society through the experiences and themes depicted in artistic expression. In the face of the devastation that has befallen their country we come to see that artists are not only makers of art but are themselves responding to the world around them. Their artwork melds together their responses – namely their activism in protest art – with their duties as citizens and participants in the social and political environment. They have, in this sense, an agential artistic space that is fluidic and responding to violence and threats. Importantly, and especially within artists’ space to critique and make sense of the world around them, we find a semblance of autonomy (Bourdieu 1996) - the personal space for negotiating the world - that can reveal and put to question issues that art can more easily assume to address. 

Iraqi Protest Art demonstrates that artists and protestors more generally, by huddling together in the 2019 protests, could muster sufficient levels of confidence to contest post-2003 politics and its outcomes on everyday life. Indeed, through images of resistance and discontent, protestors coalesced around symbols of the 2019 protests in ways to contest the ‘rules of the game’ that had been established by the US Occupation authorities from 2003. It is not surprising then, given the threat that public artwork represented, that protestors as well as artists were targeted as a threat to the increasingly entrenched political elites who saw their own interests endangered by the protest movement. 

Given the ways in which life’s issues are depicted through art, protests can elevate issues to the public sphere in ways that would ordinarily not be possible. Protests are by their very nature public expressions and as such represent acts of defiance particularly in a context of extended periods of violence and the degradation of civil society. In this spirit, artists’ contribution to protests can be seen as an attempt to counter people’s withdrawal from public engagement and politics, a process that is itself characterised by exclusionary political structures characterised by disenfranchisement and oppression. 

Symbolic forms of expression that attract and influence wider public interest commonly exposes power, including of state authorities, for its inherent ineffectiveness. In Iraq, it rendered farcical everyday forms of injustices normalised by violence. In this vein, symbolic power of art is similarly a ‘power of consecration or revelation, the power to consecrate or to reveal thing that are already there’ (Bourdieu 1989, 23). This study demonstrates how art in protest commonly works to untangle the normalization of absurdity from the pursuit of human dignity. Protest art can thus challenge the reproduction of an entire, albeit failing, political system as it poses a threat to those who seek to rule through threats, violence and generalised fear.