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Rheim Alkadhi, View of the enclave, 2019-2022, photograph that has been digitally, conceptually, or otherwise altered. Courtesy the artist.
Join us for the preview of Templates for Liberation, Rheim Alkadhi’s first UK exhibition. Addressing ongoing consequences of war and colonialism in present-day Iraq and the region at large, this exhibition presents sculptures, archival documentation, and emancipatory counter-histories. The ICA’s main gallery will feature a series of sculptures fabricated from the heavy-duty transport tarpaulins of cross-border industrial vehicles. These sculptures bear the traces of their transnational passage; the material itself embodies the environmental and sociopolitical violence consuming the region. The adjacent reading room offers archival and speculative reference points for thinking about Iraq’s colonial borders, resource extraction, and the ensuing practices of biometric categorisation that would exploit ethnic differences for decades to come. Alkadhi conceives of this exhibition as a material template for a set of liberatory encounters: to re-imagine global space—and our agency in our short-term inhabiting of it—proposing ways of refusing the violence and injustice that characterise our times.
Rheim Alkadhi is a visual artist who lives in Berlin, while working internationally. Alkadhi’s feminist practice involves extensive field research around migration, borders, imperialism, ecology and environmentalism, through intimate personal encounters. The artist’s process-based practice thinks through materials on an intimate human scale within specific geopolitical contexts of displacement. Projects have been conducted in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, and along Europe’s borders. Most recently, the solo exhibition Devastation on Your Beautiful Eyes (2022) was presented at Beirut Art Center. Prior to that, the installation Speak, Then, Material Witness, in the Medium of Rebellion! (2022) was presented as ‘embodied curriculum’ for area schools, at Kunstverein Uelzen. Alkadhi was a Guggenheim fellow (2020), and a fellow of the artistic research consortium, Künstlerische Forschung-Berlin (2020/2021). A field study on migrant passage via the island of Lesvos is presented in the film Arrival Points (2021), which has been included in festivals and exhibitions. The artist’s monograph Majnoon Field Guide (Archive Books, 2023) comprises the projects and writings of the past few years.
Book tickets
06:30 pm
Mon, 10 Jun 2024
Lower Gallery
Monday 10 June 2024, from 6:30pm
Access Info
• The exhibition is accessible by wheelchair.
• Hardback chairs may be requested from the front desk.
Access Info
• The exhibition is accessible by wheelchair.
• Hardback chairs may be requested from the front desk.
Red Members gain unlimited access to all exhibitions, films, talks, performances and Cinema 3.
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no. 236848.