Michael Rakowitz: Proxies for Poets and Palaces

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz draws upon his Arab-Jewish heritage to scrutinize Western interventions in the Middle East. His works foreground the significance of cultural heritage in times of war and probe the ways in which societies negotiate the relative value of human life and cultural monuments. 

At the centre of this exhibition are eight reliefs conceived specifically for Stavanger Art Museum, presented as a room within a room. These reliefs are reconstructions of sculptures that once adorned the walls of a chamber in the Assyrian Northwest Palace of Kalhu (near present-day Mosul). They form part of Rakowitz’s ongoing series The invisible enemy should not exist, originally initiated as a response to the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq. Rather than replicating the lost objects, the artist “reappears” them using discarded materials to evoke their absence. In this way, the artworks are “ghosts” of the originals—meant to haunt the viewer by serving as reminders of loss, rather than as replacements.  
 
Built in the 9th century BCE by Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE), the palace became a site of extensive excavation and removal beginning in 1849, with reliefs and objects dispersed across Western museums and collections. The eight panels presented here remained in situ until March 2015, when ISIS destroyed the palace in the wake of the Iraq War. Empty sections within the installation signify panels that were extracted and taken abroad during the 19th and 20th centuries.   
 
Presented in the exhibition is also What dust will rise? For this project, commissioned by Documenta 13, Rakowitz visited the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan, where in 2001 the Taliban had blown up two enormous ancient statues of the Buddha. With Afghan and Italian stonemasons, he used travertine from the valley to carve books from the Hessian State Library in Kassel that had been charred in a 1941 bombing raid, displaying them alongside a collection of objects derived from a history of violence. While in Bamiyan, Rakowitz collaborated with Afghan sculptor Abbas Allah Dad, who had faced threats from the Taliban, and German sculptor-restorer Bert Praxenthaler, to convene a seminar with local students in a monastic cave near the niche of one of the destroyed Buddhas. Since then, the students have developed a new sculptural practice rooted in Hazara cultural heritage. 
 
In I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze, Rakowitz investigates the intersections of art and politics, guided by his engagement with the work of poet and musician Leonard Cohen. Deeply moved by Cohen’s poetry at a concert he saw live in Chicago, Rakowitz later followed the controversy surrounding Cohen’s planned 2009 show in Tel Aviv. In response to protests by pro-Palestinian advocates, Cohen sought to balance his appearance with a parallel concert in Ramallah; amid accusations of tokenism, the Ramallah performance was boycotted and ultimately cancelled. As a Jewish supporter of the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), Rakowitz questioned Cohen’s position while reflecting on the efficacy of cultural boycotts. Considering his own Arab-Jewish heritage, he contemplated restaging the cancelled Ramallah concert himself. Acquiring Cohen’s Olivetti typewriter via eBay, he drafted a script imagining the unperformed concert and wrote Cohen a letter seeking permission to perform the songs—a request that went unanswered. 

Originally presented in the context of a 2017 exhibition honouring Leonard Cohen in Montréal, Cohen’s manager declared the film unsuitable and revoked Rakowitz’s future rights to Cohen’s music. Six years later, Rakowitz and his co-director Robert Chase Heishman restored the work in a new form, commissioning a soundtrack from musician Bill McKay, and including voiceovers from friends in Palestine and beyond who describe what is lost in the sections where Cohen’s music has been silenced. The title, I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze, derives from Cohen’s poem “Recitation.” The project exemplifies Rakowitz’s ability to uncover connections, tensions, and unresolved narratives through the close examination of singular historical events. 

Through an interplay of film, sculpture, and collected objects, Rakowitz revisits historical events with acute sensitivity to nuance and contradiction. His oeuvre underscores art’s potential to disrupt entrenched imperialist modes of thought. This exhibition constitutes the first major survey of Rakowitz’s work in Norway.  

Curator: Hanne Beate Ueland