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Nasher Prize laureate Michael Rakowitz finally gets his due after pandemic delay

The artist’s work often deals with displaced populations and cultures.

When artist Michael Rakowitz won the Nasher Prize in late 2019, the world was a vastly different place.

Typically, the announcement of the prestigious prize — which has been handed out annually since 2016 and includes a $100,000 check and an award designed by Nasher architect Renzo Piano — is followed by a series of in-person events. The lectures, panels, openings and the like are designed to introduce the public to an artist who is reshaping contemporary sculpture and engaging with ideologies and practices that expand beyond the gallery.

But the pandemic had other plans.

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Prior to lockdown, Rakowitz was only able to take part in one of his scheduled events, a public barbecue held in conjunction with two Dallas-based nonprofits: Break Bread Break Borders, which trains refugee women in the culinary arts, and Farmers Assisting Returning Military, which provides therapeutic agricultural training to veterans. More than 500 people attended the event, fulfilling Rakowitz’s vision of a place for gathering, storytelling and communion.

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Michael Rakowitz was only able to conduct one of his scheduled events before the pandemic...
Michael Rakowitz was only able to conduct one of his scheduled events before the pandemic shutdowns, a public barbecue held in conjunction with two Dallas-based nonprofits: Break Bread Break Borders, which trains refugee women in the culinary arts, and Farmers Assisting Returning Military, which provides therapeutic agricultural training to veterans.(Nasher Scul)

As an artist whose work regularly employs socially conscious efforts that connect the general public with overlooked and disenfranchised communities, Rakowitz was uniquely primed for a series of gatherings. However, given that his work directly engages with the diasporic narratives of his own Iraqi-Jewish family as well as other displaced populations, he was also unusually attuned to the unexpected societal/cultural downshifts and make-do workarounds necessitated by COVID-19 restrictions.

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Rakowitz splits his time between New York City and Chicago, where he is a professor of art at Northwestern University. His grandparents fled from Baghdad to India during World War II and later settled in Long Island, N.Y., where he was born in 1973. The artist spent his upbringing immersed in Iraqi culture; his grandparents’ home was filled with the food, music, art and iconography of his ancestral land. He has often described his grandparents as the “first installation artists” he ever encountered, their apartment a miniature version of the world they left behind, albeit one that could be only partially experienced in its replicated form.

Michael Rakowitz's “paraSITE” homeless shelters were inspired by Bedouin tents in Jordan....
Michael Rakowitz's “paraSITE” homeless shelters were inspired by Bedouin tents in Jordan. Rakowitz has created more than 90 of the structures, which are made to latch onto buildings’ exterior HVAC units, using the outgoing air for inflation and heat.(Michael Rakowitz)

These memories would take hold in Rakowitz’s graduate studies in public art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1990s. During this time, he took a trip to Jordan, where he encountered Bedouin tents designed to respond to wind patterns. Inspired by the adaptability of the architecture as well as the opportunity to explore a community and way of living unknown to much of the Western world, Rakowitz started his ongoing project, “paraSITE,” a series of custom-fabricated shelters for the homeless. The structures are made to latch onto buildings’ exterior HVAC units, using the outgoing air for inflation and heat. Since 1998, he has created more than 90 shelters, each made in conjunction with its intended owner.

Following this trajectory of sculpture as a socially conscious device, Rakowitz went on to create a number of projects and interventions that delved deeper into the machinations behind displaced populations, primarily people who are swept aside or disappeared by war.

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Enemy Kitchen (2003) was inspired by a comment made by the artist’s mother about the lack of Iraqi restaurants in the United States, pointing out that Western minds only thought of the country as a source of oil and war. The idea eventually became a Chicago-based mobile food truck, through which American Gulf War veterans cook and serve traditional Iraqi dishes. His project RETURN (2004) involved taking over a Brooklyn storefront in order to reopen his grandfather’s defunct import business.

Although he imported a variety of Iraqi goods, Rakowitz focused on dates and date syrup — once the country’s secondary commodity, behind oil. It was during this time that he discovered that Iraq circumvented government sanctions by sending harvested dates to Lebanon, where they were packaged and exported as a Lebanese product, their provenance lost through the necessity of survival. Spoils (2011) featured a meal of venison atop date syrup and tahini, served on plates looted from former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s palaces. The artist purchased the plates on eBay and later returned them to the Iraqi government.

In 2007, Rakowitz embarked on his primary series, “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist,” a portion of which is currently on view at the Nasher. Named after an ancient Babylonian road, the series involves the painstaking reproduction of ancient Iraqi artifacts, some of which were stolen and sold to major Western museums (where most remain) in the 19th and 20th centuries; others were decimated by the Islamic State group within the last decade.

Michael Rakowitz's series “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist” involves the painstaking...
Michael Rakowitz's series “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist” involves the painstaking reproduction of ancient Iraqi artifacts, some of which were stolen and sold to major Western museums in the 19th and 20th centuries, while others were decimated by the Islamic State group within the last decade. A portion of the series is on view at the Nasher.(Arturo Sanchez / Jane Lombard Gallery)

Rakowitz describes these creations as “ghosts” or “reappearances.” Structurally, they resemble their precursors, but they are covered with colorful skins derived from slivers of everyday Iraqi items: Arabic newspapers, food packaging and date syrup tins. These replicas are not meant to fool but are instead designed to act as makeshift shrines, shimmering mirages of what once was.

The sculptures range from the petite to the grandiose: The smallest can sit comfortably in the palm of a hand, while the largest, The Lamassu of Nineveh, recently occupied the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. The works on view at the Nasher are re-created reliefs from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, destroyed by the Islamic State in 2015. Empty spaces are deliberately situated among the reimagined structures, calling attention to those that have vanished from record, their whereabouts, and fates, unknown. Rakowitz gives absence and presence equal weight and space.

This theme is also apparent in his 2017 stop-motion video The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, which is included in the Nasher exhibition. The main character is a G.I. Joe-style doll that was only available for purchase on American military bases during the second Iraq War. The doll was the unwitting subject of a 2005 video in which militants claimed it to be a captured soldier named John Adam, whom they threatened to behead if American-held Iraqi prisoners were not set free.

Michael Rakowitz's 2017 stop-motion video "The Ballad of Special Ops Cody" is being shown at...
Michael Rakowitz's 2017 stop-motion video "The Ballad of Special Ops Cody" is being shown at the Nasher Sculpture Center.(Jane Lombard Gallery)
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Throughout the course of the video, Special Ops Cody apologizes to Mesopotamian artifacts held in a museum, relating his experiences as a soldier — a person thrust into a new, unknown place, caught in a situation he doesn’t fully understand — to those of the artifacts. We see Cody struggle to comprehend the magnitude of his actions and the gruesome violence he has seen and in which he has participated. In the end, he takes his place alongside the motionless statues, another silent casualty of war. Cody is a reminder that even if people physically survive violence, they leave a mental and emotional vestige of themselves behind; part of them will always be trapped in that particular time and place.

Rakowitz emboldens hidden communities, ones that find the fortitude to persevere while continually being dismissed through hollow offerings of “thoughts and prayers” and pledges to “do better.” He showcases the resolve and innovative problem-solving that allow these communities to reincarnate, while acknowledging their longing for what was and the loss of what could have been. It’s difficult to sum up the entirety of Rakowitz’s practice in one story, and that is part of the point: Work rooted in human emotion is not easy, and it is never finished.

But strength and joy can be found in the incomplete, in the absences, in the unseen.

Details

The exhibition: “Michael Rakowitz: 2020 Nasher Prize Laureate” is on view through April 18 at the Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St., Dallas. 214-242-5100. Thursday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., with timed ticket entry. nashersculpturecenter.org.

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Live virtual event: Rakowitz will hold a live virtual lecture for the Nasher on Friday, April 16, at noon. He will explore the question: “If I can’t be there with you, how can I show you where I am?” And he’ll discuss the meanings of places and objects in and around his home in Chicago as well as those further afield. Rakowitz will be available for questions following the talk.