The Arts of Destruction

Hanaa Malallah
The Arts of Destruction

Hanaa Malallah is a leading Iraqi artist and a key member of the so-called Eighties Generation. The term was coined by a critic in June 1991 during an exhibition held at the Art Center in Baghdad of a dozen emerging artists whose maturation coincided with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War (1980 –1988) and the beginning of the 1st Gulf War with the annexation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1990. As a group, they decided above all to stay, to study and to practice their art in Iraq; their work reflecting these decisions.

Restriction on travel, severe economic hardship and social instability that comes with incessant armed conflict lead to a gradual estrangement from the regional and international art world. Financial and trade embargoes imposed by the United Nations Security Council, which lasted until the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, only reinforced this isolation. These circumstances have radically affected collective practice and the theory that underlies the creative process. Consequently, the artists of the “Eighties Generation” advanced a distinct and recognizable aesthetic, an approach to artistic production both situated in the Mesopotamian past and reflecting the Iraqi reality during this period. From the point of view of the history of contemporary art, they are considered an artistic movement or a school of great importance.

Hanaa Malallah's works are burned, torn, scratched and put together, often accompanied by a slight smell of smoke. Yet for all the painful allusions to the destruction of his native land, the artist's works connect to a spiritual notion of the ephemeral beyond geography and history.