Rheim Alkadhi: Templates for Liberation

The tarpaulin used throughout Templates for Liberation, the debut solo exhibition by Rheim Alkadhi (b.1973) in the United Kingdom, is so sturdy and encrusted with grime that at first glance it looks like crumpled metal. As urgent testaments to the continuing impact of colonialism in Iraq, where the artist lived as a child, each sculpture evokes a kind of diffuse, looming violence. Material is pinned to walls by rusted nails, smoothed onto the floor and pushed into rigid grey waves that resemble bent tinfoil FIG.1. Found abandoned in Berlin and transported to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (ICA), the tarpaulin is the heavy-duty kind used for cross-border industrial vehicles, and it carries the traces of that history.

Alkadhi forces a confrontation with the textured, haptic qualities of the material. Take, for example, For the Oppressed to Narrate the Crimes of Their Oppressors (Devastation Panorama) FIG.2, in which thick tarpaulin curves around a wall, blackened and lumpy with tar as though it were the base of a charred pan FIG.3. Directly opposite, Disappeared Border Segment FIG.4 is cracked and weathered, slumping into haphazard folds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick distinguishes between texture and ‘texxture’, the latter being ‘dense with offered information about how, substantively, historically, materially, it came into being’.¹ Dense instead with suggestion, the tarpaulin offers evidence of its own transnational movement.

This type of tarpaulin is a petroleum-based thermoplastic, made from the residue of crude-oil refinement. It is bound up with geopolitical and ecological realities; Iraq’s production of oil and petroleum has had a devastating impact on the region. Each sculpture embodies its own creation, but this is foregrounded most obviously in Harvest of Flames FIG.5. Warped red metal rises and unfurls in jagged shapes from a flat base of frayed grey tarpaulin. They could be ravaged flowers in a barren landscape, or, as the title suggests, flames pushing through the cracks in a slab of rock. The sculpture evokes burning oil fields, perhaps even the permanent gas fire at Baba Gurgur in northern Iraq. Here, the landscape and the sculpture are in direct dialogue: the oil field produces the tarpaulin, the tarpaulin reproduces the oil field.

Alkadhi’s found objects are testament to the damaging impact of capitalist extraction and colonial interests, but their recontextualisation stages an encounter with the materiality of the work of art itself. The viewer cannot be sure what has been added by the artist and what is an original feature of the component parts. Are the green leaf-like shapes clustering along the wire climbing To Demilitarize (Disarmed Wing of Hermes UAV M.A.L.E. Drone) FIG.6 merely reflectors found with the material, or a deliberate botanical flourish? One might think of Simryn Gill’s photographic series Channel (2014), which documents detritus washed up on the shores of a mangrove forest in Malaysia. Depleting the last stores of Gill’s Ilfochrome paper, which is no longer manufactured, the photographs are implicated in the materiality of their production as well as of their subjects.

Throughout Templates for Liberation, the violence inherent in the manufacture, distribution and use of petroleum-based materials is made evident. Alongside transporting drones and other weapons, the tarpaulins would also have been used to shelter migrants displaced by sociopolitical conflicts and ecological crises. The heft of the tarpaulin makes physical what is often obscured or distanced. Instead of the expected aerial views from satellites or drones, Alkadhi renders a kind of material immediacy. The sculptures narrativise their own coming into being, literalised in the title For the Oppressed to Narrate the Crimes of Their Oppressors. The viewer is placed into a new relationship with the history of resource extraction and distribution that characterises the tarpaulin. The ‘templates’ to be found in the exhibition are those of imperialist violence, twisted into new forms, no longer fit for their original purpose. Their recontextualisation is also a disarming: just as the tarpaulin in Alkadhi’s sculptures is reshaped, so might the other forms inherited from oppressive systems.

In the Reading Room, we move away from the materiality that is centred in the main gallery FIG.7. Through archival documents, topographical studies, and ethnographic data, Alkadhi elucidates a larger colonial project. A central table provides scans and photographs of memos and government agreements from 1916 to 1922, recording British interests in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). An accompanying display case presents American anthropological and ethnographic publications from 1935 to 1962. Portraits of indigenous inhabitants are paired with collections of biometric data and descriptions of numbered subjects. Among the features noted are ‘low brows’ and ‘unusually hirsute’ arms.

Here, Alkadhi offers an emancipatory response to the indexing and categorisation of difference. The artist provides her own interpretations, which are printed on orange card. We may ‘infer’ that one photographed figure joined the resistance, purely from the quality of her gaze. Talismanic sentences become rallying cries: ‘we are extensions of each other, unflinchingly for and with each other’. As Alkadhi explained in a 2016 interview, ‘elements of language operate the same way as visuals […] one must find […] gestures that indicate a desire for justice in this lifetime’.² Most evocatively, the artist contrasts ethnographic photography with her series Transynchronic Rebel Portraits FIG.8. Gazing out at the viewer from within their frames, the portraits are, as the accompanying text states, an attempt to dissolve ‘the categorisations that have divided us’. Alkadhi models a different kind of appropriation than that of her tarpaulin sculptures. Instead, language, image and map are plumbed for traces of speculative and half-imagined insurgencies.

Rebel Portraits, however, might also speak to the precarious nature of appropriation. The photograph is as much a tool for surveillance and abjection as it is for emancipation – injustices can be exacerbated and categorisations deepened. In the installation, traces of discomfort are felt: ‘many would argue that the rebel face should not be visible’. Tarpaulin, even, resists its own refashioning. Recalcitrant, it can only be manipulated so much. The templates that Alkadhi provides are speculative and suggestive, like the emancipatory counter-histories of her archival research. Despite this, the artist’s repurposing of material and archival history creates openings and new trajectories. In refashioning, we discover new agency. We have been given all this, what will we now do with it?