I'm writing further on the consequences of the war in Iraq.
More to come.
Here is an reminder:
09/02/2023
05/02/2023
2023 - Let's talk about Iraq, 20 years after the biggest Anglo-American mistake
Since July 2022, I've been thinking about the 20 years of the start of the war in Iraq, in March 2023, and suggested to my co-contributing editors at the Markaz review to dedicate an issue on the country.
I'm also preparing a few other articles.
In a previous post here, I also explained the link between my research on music history and politics, my book on Bristol, and my recent work for a couple of reviews and websites.
Read here: 2003-2023.
As I wrote in this post, I went to the US, to Northwestern University's Journalism school, as the war was starting, in April 2003. In April 2016, I travelled to Iraq Kurdistan, while finishing the French version of my book, working for a charity helping women and displaced people on the ground, more on this work here: Iraq: Action in Kurdistan and Nineveh for IPDs.
Now, thanks to months of dedicated work, TMR 28 is here !
TMR 28 • IRAQ
I asked my friend, the photographer Susan Schulman, who has spent time in Iraq recently, to write a text and share some photographs:
Writer-photographer Susan Schulman documents the climate devastation that has sent many Iraqis into internal exile.
I wrote about music and sound, after interviewing Hardi Kurda,
Hardi Kurda: Archiving the Sounds of Northern Iraq
5 February, 2023 •
Composer, sound artist and researcher Hardi Kurda is founder of Space21, a music festival operating from his hometown, Slemani (Sulaymaniyyah), in Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurda is at the heart of the Archive Khanah: Sounds from Iraq project, a community-based archive celebrating Iraq’s musical and sonic diversity, financially supported by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Fund (AFAC). To demonstrate connections between the musical traditions of Iraq, it digitizes selected records, has created an online interactive archival map, and may yet host a physical exhibition.
Read here.
All all the Iraq stories featured here on TMR Issue 28.
-
Post scriptum
Iraq - A bit of Recent History
The modern nation-state of Iraq was created following World War I (1914–18) from the Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.
It derives its name from the Arabic term used in the premodern period to describe a region that roughly corresponded to Mesopotamia and modern northwestern Iran.
Britain seized Iraq from Ottoman Turkey during World War I and was granted a mandate by the League of Nations to govern the nation in 1920.
A Hashemite monarchy was organised under British protection in 1921, and on October 3, 1932, the kingdom of Iraq was granted independence.
Iraq gained formal independence in 1932 but remained subject to British imperial influence during the next quarter century of turbulent monarchical rule.
The Iraqi government maintained close economic and military ties with Britain, leading to several anti-British revolts.
A revolt in 1941 led to a British military intervention, and the Iraqi government agreed to support the Allied war effort.
In 1958, the monarchy was overthrown, and for the next two decades Iraq was ruled by a series of military and civilian governments.
In 1961, Kuwait gained independence from Britain and Iraq claimed sovereignty over Kuwait. A period of considerable instability followed.
With proven oil reserves second in the world only to those of Saudi Arabia, the regime was able to finance ambitious projects and development plans throughout the 1970s and to build one of the largest and best-equipped armed forces in the Arab world.
The party’s leadership was quickly assumed by Saddam Hussein.
He led the country into disastrous military efforts: first the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), then the Persian Gulf War (1990–91).
On 6 August 1990, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 661 which imposed economic sanctions on Iraq.
The Gulf War thus started, as an armed campaign waged by a 35-country military coalition in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Spearheaded by the United States, the coalition's efforts against Iraq were carried out in two key phases:
-Operation Desert Shield, which marked the military buildup from August 1990 to January 1991;
-and Operation Desert Storm, which began with the aerial bombing campaign against Iraq on 17 January 1991 and came to a close with the American-led Liberation of Kuwait on 28 February 1991.
Sanctions were still applied during the 1990s.
In 2003, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on New York city in 2001, an American-British coalition launched the Second Iraq War, on false allegations around the search for WMD, weapons of mass destruction.
01/02/2023
A recent review of my (not so recent now) book on Bristol, Massive Attack and their British counter-culture
Published in December 2022, on Goodreads:
"I had a great time reading this book, it’s been truly insightful - insightful into a band that changed the course of British music history, into the socio-political and economic context of Bristol in the ‘90s and the impact the 60s Windrush had on the musical influences of the place around the time and into the connections and tensions between the band’s members.
I was interested to read this book to find out more about the political and social context of the UK at the time and the impact it had on music, specifically on the underground - the book did not disappoint at all. It was a brilliant presentation of the context and the band, going back and forth between the two as you couldn’t have spoken about one without the other.
Thoroughly researched and accessible, I feel I have learned a great deal about a group that I truly love and admire.
A personal critique would be perhaps that the story seems to somewhat revolve around 3D / Robert Del Naja; while I understand he was the main creative and cog in the MA wheel, I wanted to know more about Daddy G and Tricky (particularly their Afro-Caribbean context and how this influenced their career paths in and outside of MA).
Overall, a beautiful read.
I would recommend to anyone who is a fan of the MA phenomenon, British underground and electronica - or simply interested to understand how a phenomenon of this calibre is born."
-
I do want to reply to the criticism, as I heard that a couple of times:
I interviews over 30 artists for this book, and when I met Robert, he completely stood out. Our discussions helped me tremendously and his interest in activism was so genuine, I therefore decided to centre the whole story around his work, to anchor the different elements, music, arts, stage work and politics, around a strong axis.
Otherwise, it would have been an impossible mission in terms of storytelling, and risked ending up sounding like a A to Z on the Bristol scene, with dozens of entries. I didn't want that.
I sometimes think that is why such a book never came to life before I started this work in 2015.
Robert helped me find the inspiration for a strong and unique narrative arche, and I was really grateful.
If anyone want to take another angle, I'm sure, it could be interesting too. Look, Tricky wrote his biography, I reviewed it and interviewed him about it.
As for Grant Marshall (aka Daddy G), he swears he will one day work on a film project about his life... Be patient. Or not!
-
Another short review, extract from Crack Magazine:
-
24/01/2023
Congratulations, John Akomfrah ! Who will represent Britain at 2024 Venice Biennial
The Ghanaian British filmmaker and video artist John Akomfrah will represent Britain at the next Venice Biennial.
Skinder Hundal, the global director of arts at the British Council and commissioner of the British Pavilion, just said in a statement:
"The quality and contextual depth of his artistry never fails to inspire deep reflection and awe. For the British Council to have such a significant British-Ghanaian artist in Venice is an exhilarating moment."
Akomfrah himself replied in a statement:
"I’m grateful to be given a moment to explore the complex history and significance of this institution [the British Pavilion] and the nation it represents, as well as its architectural home in Venice, with all the stories it has told and will continue to."
Born in Accra, Ghana in 1957, John Akomfrah has been based in London since childhood.
He came to prominence in the early 1980s as part of the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), a group of seven artists founded in 1982.
From his early years with the BAFC to his recent works as a solo artist, he has explored charged social issues—including racial injustice, colonialist legacies, diasporic identities, migration and extreme weather events—through a distinctive approach to memory and history.
He was knighted in the King’s New Year UK Honours List for 2023.
-
Well known for his "searing video installations" examining issues ranging from climate change to colonialism, I've been following his work closely since I met him in January 2016 at Arnolfini.
He became the main inspiration for my art book as I explain here.
'My favourite show at the Arnolfini was definitely ‘Vertigo Sea’ by Ghanaian British filmmaker John Akomfrah, in 2016! His work with the Black Audio Film Collective and lately Smoking Dogs Film has had a huge influence on my tastes in art and reflections on our post-modern world…'
John Akomfrah in conversation. Photo by myself, 16 January 2016, Arnolfini, Bristol
Recently, his films were shown in many art venues:
- 'Purple' in DC, USA:
The film was created for the Curve at the Barbican centre, just after the artist won the 2017 Artes Mundi prize,
An ambitious project, Purple is an immersive, six-channel video installation addressing climate change and its effects on human communities, biodiversity and the wilderness.
The Barbican wrote: "At a time, when according to the UN, greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are at their highest levels in history, with people experiencing the significant impacts of climate change, including shifting weather patterns, rising sea level, and more extreme weather events, Akomfrah’s Purple brings a multitude of ideas into conversation including animal extinctions, the memory of ice, the plastic ocean and global warming. Akomfrah has combined hundreds of hours of archival footage with newly shot film and a hypnotic sound score to produce the video installation."
- 'The Unfinished Conversation' was screened at Tate Britain, until the end of 2022.
- 'Mimesis: African Soldier' on the soldiers of the Commonwealth is at Bristol Museum now until Jan. 2023: https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/john-akomfrah-mimesis-african-soldier/
His work will also be exhibited at the next Sharjah Biennial (7 February-11 June 2023), and then at The Box, in Plymouth, from December 2023.
-
I've been willing to write further about his work and journey for a long time!
As an artist, filmmaker, and thinker, John Akomfrah has helped reshaping the debate on "otherness" in the UK
He is one of the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective, launched in 1982 by a group of Black British filmmakers, based in Portsmouth and in Dalston, East London, mostly in response to anti-racist protests in Brixton from 1981.
The filmmakers were John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and Trevor Mathison. Their work was first screened at Arnolfini in 1986.
They produced award-winning films, photographs, slide tapes, videos, installations, posters and interventions.
John Akomfrah explained in October 2020: “From the beginning, I wanted to be part of a collective, of a group of like-minded artists and especially people of colour. We were into doing our own things, not into trying to get in where we knew we were not expected.”
Among the films were ‘Expeditions: Signs of Empire’ (1989) and the 35mm colour 22-minute short film ‘Images of Nationality’, directed by John Akomfrah and produced by Lina Gopaul (1984), as well as Akomfrah’s ‘Handsworth Songs’ (1986), a reflection on anti-racist protests.
The film offers a deconstruction of the blaming of young anti-racist protestors, and the police’s violent response, together with a lyrical analysis of post-colonial migration history. The film won seven international awards in 1987. It revolves around techniques that made Black Audio Film Collective recognisable: a multi-layered and complex narrative, visual and sonic experimentation, a mix of archival material, newsreels and still photographs of Black people’s lives.
The collective operated until 1998.
A decade later, in 2007, Arnolfini would co-curate a major retrospective of their work with The Otolith Group entitled ‘The Ghosts of Songs’.
Since the dismantling of the collective in 1998, former members Lina Gopaul and David Lawson have created the production company Smoking Dogs Film with Akomfrah. They produced the multi-screened installations The Unfinished Conversation (2012) and The Stuart Hall Project (2013), which provided in depth insight into their major intellectual influence: Stuart Hall. Born in Jamaica, Hall arrived in Britain in 1951 to study at Oxford University. His incisive writing analysed Britain’s imperial and economic disempowerment of its former colonies, as well as the major changes induced in Britain by displacements of colonial subjects.
Akomfrah’s recent work has been more often featured in galleries than on television or in cinemas. He has evolved toward a radical artistic approach and started using cinematic archives to compose art films projected as multi-screened installations, or as he called it himself: “a post-cinematic world of moving images”.
His film Vertigo Sea, created for the Venice Biennale in 2015, premiered in the UK at Arnolfini in Bristol, as many of the images had been found in the BBC Natural History Unit's archives in the city.
In my book on Bristol, I wrote:
'Shattering reflexion on slavery, migration and conflict, the film was projected on three large screens, delivering a sensual, poetic meditation on our relationship with the sea, exploring its role, both mesmerising and tragic, in human history, using television archives and images from the BBC Natural History Unit, based in Bristol.'
“I haven’t destroyed this country,” wrote John Akomfrah in the Guardian at the time of the screening, “there’s no reason other immigrants would252,” offering a vibrant plea in favour of human rights and solidarity. A week later, he was in Bristol for a public conference in the gallery and reminded the audience that “it is not possible to immerse the past for good and expect it to disappear,” in front of dozens of people who opened a debate on Bristol’s past in slave trade and raised again the question of the naming of the Colston Hall.
Vertigo Sea offers a poetic, visual, sonic and deeply moving meditation on our relationship with the sea, exploring its role, both mesmerising and tragic, in recent human history, migration, conflict, slavery and environmental exploitation.
The Guardian’s Adrian Searle described how “the ecological and the political combine in a 43-minute visual assault.” For the creation of the piece, John Akomfrah worked with a huge range of archival footage of the sea from the BFI and the BBC. (Bristol itself came to be at the centre of this exploratory visual project, as the filmmaker did research and used archives from the BBC Natural History Unit, in Clifton). Hundreds of clips and images of the ocean, beaches, skies, icebergs, animals – most notably whales - are used to represent humanity’s violence against nature, and as metaphors for humanity’s violence against itself.
Since 2006, I had regularly been working with one of John Akomfrah's friends – the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. And had been introduced to his work, especially while doing research on Karl Marx, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon and Exterminate All The Brutes on the history of settler colonialism / white supremacy.
His work has been one of the most eye-opening for me and my research since I came back to Britain in 2015, and I'm really grateful for his contribution to British arts.
23/01/2023
Music in the SWANA region: On Rasha Nahas
My latest on music in the SWANA region for The Markaz Review: this month, with the powerfully feminist Rasha Nahas, back with a second album, written in Arabic between her native Haifa and her adopted Berlin.
Berlin-Based Palestinian Returns to Arabic in new Amrat Album
Have a read on The Markaz Review: https://themarkaz.org/berlin-based-palestinian-returns-to-arabic-in-new-amrat-album/
22/01/2023
'Give Thanks & Praises'
New song by by Philippe Cohen Solal & Keziah Jones
article in french:
« Class Of 89 »: L’EP groovy de Philippe
Cohen-Solal et Keziah Jones réchauffe notre hiver
18/01/2023
Algerian-French artist Katia Kameli in Paris for the opening of her new show
Katia Kameli is here at the opening of her new exhibition 'Hier revient et je l'entends' at Institut des Cultures d'Islam in Paris 18th.
Katia Kameli à l'inauguration de sa nouvelle exposition 'Hier revient et je l'entends' à l'Institut des Cultures d'Islam, Paris 18e.
#contemporaryart #AlgerianArtist #Paris #Algiers #art
13/01/2023
2003 - 2023
It's hard for me to believe that the time has come to talk about 2003 as 20 years ago... Yet, here we are.
That year was deeply defining for my little career as a journalist.
In early spring, a group of students from my masters travelled to Northwestern University in the deep storm of the war in Iraq. Even the most democrat of these students supported Bush and Blair's war, while us, French students, were revolted and for once proud of our government, which refused to attack Saddam Hussein and his people.
In the autumn, I went to leave and work in Central Europe, reported in Prague and Berlin, volunteered at film festivals and wrote some of my first complex articles.
The sound of that extremely political, defining year, was really that album: '100th Window'.
At the time, I couldn't care less about who had produced it, who hadn't worked on it, and why it took so long to get it out after 'Mezzanine'.
It was futuristic, political, edgy, sharp, clever, so "on point", a fast-warding jump into the 21st century, the soundtrack of my nocturnal bus rides through a snowy Europe, and immensely beautiful. The reviews in France, which I couldn't care less about reading at the time (I had my own opinion), were extremely positive.
So, ... when I came to Bristol 12 years later... I was so surprised by the backstories and how detached the city was about that great record. For more, read the 10th chapter of my book, one of my favourite.
Extract:
Massive Attack - 'Special Cases'
More on my book:
Column for Classic Album Sundays
Interview on France 24 English
Book Review
10/01/2023
Montage du Group Show 'Projections' à Quai 36 (10/01/2023)
Production et Montage du Group Show 'Projections' le 10 janvier 2023 à l'espace d'exposition de Quai 36, maison de production d'art urbain, à Romainville (93), près de Paris 19e.
Cette exposition sera l'occasion de montrer le travail sur toile de trois artistes muralistes : Nelio, Zabala et Chazme, travaillant en France, Espagne et Pologne.
Vernissage le jeudi 12 janvier 2023 à partir de 18h.
Les infos et RSVP :
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScqMQE_8LpgxcjpVT5hIdPFWGdqaIp_UMzHlh2dxI2fCIPRAA/viewform
VERNISSAGE "PROJECTIONS"
12 JANVIER 2023
Quai 36 et Hatchikian Gallery vous convient au vernissage de leur dernière exposition "Projections"
Merci de remplir ce questionnaire pour nous confirmer votre présence.
📍43 rue de la Commune de Paris, 93230 Romainville
🗓 Le 12 janvier, de 18 heures à 21 heures
02/01/2023
Winter News // Letter - Getting into 2023...
Dear friends, colleagues, art lovers,
I hope that you all are ok.
As often in the early days of a new year, a time of hope and resolutions, I want to send you my best wishes for a happy new year! May 2023 be sweet and hopeful...
Paris 19th, end of December 2022...
I hope you had a beautiful end of the year. It wasn't an easy one worldwide. I hope December treated you well and that this January promises to be even better.
London, mid-December 2022
-
As most of you know, since 2015, my work as a journalist has evolved to combine my international experience (in Africa, the USA, Great Britain, the Middle East, etc.) with a reflection on major cultural issues (art and engagement, activism, multiculturalism, feminism, politics and social change, North/South relations, anti-colonialism, etc.).
I have been able to explore these questions by working with Velvet Film, by reporting for the German international broadcaster DW, and with my writing, especially as an author in residence at the Arnolfini International Art Center, in Bristol, but also at various festivals, through my cultural journalism, on BBC radio 4, and via podcasts.
Since 2020, I have been particularly interested in artists from the SWANA region (South West Asia & North Africa, where my family is from), and their relationship to Europe and the West, but also in the place of contemporary arts in reflections on some of the profound changes of our time. Especially thanks to a few wonderful websites,
Markaz review: 'FREEDOM' issue
Read all the articles here:
My piece on music - Gultrah Sound System: The sound of freedom in Tunisia
Focus on Tunisia's street art and hip-hop culture
For Up Mag - Portrait of eL Seed:
At the Afrika Eye Film Festival, in Bristol, Nov. 2022:
Meeting Ken Loach & Palestinian / Israeli / British activists
The big moment of the end of the year 2022...
I got to meet the legendary British film director in Bristol, and to discuss the role of the BDS movement in the US and the UK, at the Bristol Palestine Film Festival
Arnolfini, Bristol, Dec. 2022
Screening of the film and Q&A at Arnolfini with Ken Loach and Palestinian, Israeli, British activists - info:
Article:
Since September 2012, I have been in contact with a few cultural centres and art galleries, on both sides of the Channel, in Bristol, London and Paris, and participated in my own way in the development of cultural projects, meetings, events, exhibitions.
I hope to be in England again soon, and to carry on working on projects that keep bringing us closer... On both sides of the English Channel, as much as from all sides of the Mediterranean.
Hoping to see you all soon here or there!!
With all the very best wishes again, stay well,
melissa
-
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)