Michael Rakowitz

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, running until August 2019, and at Castello de Rivoli, Turin, in October 2019

Iraqi-American artist Rakowitz reconstructed thousands of artefacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, and those more recently destroyed at Middle Eastern archaeological sites. Text in English and italian.Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz's (b. 1973, USA) first major European survey presents a sequence of installations drawing on architecture, cultural artefacts and cuisine to tell stories of social ritual, conflict and loss. It encompasses work considering the citizen visionaries of post Soviet Hungary, Middle Eastern Beatles fans and the stonecarvers of Afghanistan, with Rakowitz's casts of players and objects revealing the legacy of colonisation, modernism and globalism.

The artist's life-size replica of the gigantic lamassu, one of two monumental winged bulls that once guarded the gates of Nineveh in Iraq, currently features on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth. This recreation of an ancient mythological creature is made from everyday date syrup cans and is part of an epic endeavour to recreate all 7,000 objects looted from the Iraq Museum in 2003, as well as those destroyed more recently at archaeological sites like Nimrud, also presented here.

Text in English and Italian.