Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said founded the Baghdad Modern Art Group in 1951, and the question they posed was never simply how to paint. It was how to live as modern Iraqis, inheritors of an Abbasid city founded in 762 CE and of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, at a moment when the world was remaking itself around them. That question, first asked in Baghdad in 1951, is now being asked again in Abu Dhabi, where a new exhibition invites a contemporary audience to stand inside the answers a generation of Iraqi artists once drafted.
All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group is on view at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery through January 3, 2027. Curated by Dr. Nada Shabout, the exhibition brings together the artists of the original circle and those their work influenced, both in their own time and across the generations that followed, up to the present day.
Additional reference context is available at https://hyperallergic.com/exhibition-as-living-archive-the-1950s-baghdad-modern-art-group-in-the-uae-today/.
The group grew to engage many of Iraq’s leading artists, architects, poets, and others, all of them searching for a new art form. What they wanted was an art that could negotiate a time of globally inflected modernism from Baghdad, a city whose lineage stretched back to ancient Mesopotamia even as its artists looked outward to the world.
To understand what was at stake for these artists, it helps to return to the years after 1932, when the Kingdom of Iraq was formed as an independent state. Iraqi artists were then exploring the new parameters of a secularized, modern society emerging after Britain’s maneuvering to dismantle the Ottoman Empire. They questioned whether traditional practices of so-called Islamic art could present their contemporary realities, and they searched for a more effective visual language. In that context, modern art became a conduit for exploration, and Iraqi artists perceived it as a global space of shared humanity.
That search was not carried out by individuals working alone. Various artist groups launched initiatives to convey the importance of national representation through culture, including the promotion of the modern art movement in Iraq. The period set the stage for Iraq’s so-called golden age of the 1950s, a time of maturation for a generation of artists who were pivotal in initiating rigorous standards of art theory and practice, and who thereby charted new possibilities for the generations that came after them.
The roster of names in the Abu Dhabi exhibition reads like a map of that legacy. It includes Faraj Abbo, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Himat Mohammad Ali, Rasoul Alwan, Suad al-Attar, Qahtan Awni, Dia al-Azzawi, Bogus Bablanian, Amar Dawod, Ghassan Ghaib, Faiq (Faeq) Hassan, Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Rand Abdul Jabbar, Fouad Jihad, Saadi Al Kaabi, Ardash Kakafian, Salma Khoury, Hanaa Malallah, Mahmoud Obaidi, Widad al-Orfali, Khalid al-Rahal, Kareem Risan, Miran al-Saadi, Mahmoud Sabri, Naziha Salim, Nizar (Nazar) Salim, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Delair Shaker, Jewad Selim, Lorna Selim, Walid Siti, Ismail Fattah (Al-Turk), Madiha Umar, Khalil al-Ward, and Nazar Yahya. Seen together, these names trace a chain of influence that runs from the founders to artists working today.
The person responsible for assembling that chain is Dr. Nada Shabout, a scholar who has published widely on modern and contemporary Arab and Iraqi art and has curated numerous exhibitions. She has joined NYU Abu Dhabi as a senior investigator at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art and as a visiting professor of art history. She is also the founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art from the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA) and the founding director of the Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA).
What the exhibition ultimately suggests is that the group’s experimental ethos has never really ended. It continues to resonate today beyond Baghdad, directing and connecting contemporary Iraqi artists around the world to each other. For visitors to the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, the show offers a chance to see how a conversation begun in 1951 is still very much alive, and where it might travel next.