Visualizing Grief: Iraqi Women, Longing, and Loss

Rose Hattab

MENAS Ph.D. Candidate

Visualizing Grief: Iraqi Women, Longing, and Loss

This talk explores the way artmaking in Iraq has been transformed in the last few decades from the 1970s to the present time. It argues that Iraqi artists, notably women, have been actively engaged, both intellectually and creatively, to heal imperial wounds. These wounds are a direct result of the geopolitics of war, military occupations, displacement, migration, trauma, and violence that created contestation among Iraqis. At the same time, this study analyzes the remaking of Iraqi identities through a gendered perspective, where Iraqi women are no longer the imagined repositions of the patriarchal society of state but become the image creators themselves.