The Idols of ISIS by Aaron Tugendhaft

Author:Aaron Tugendhaft [Tugendhaft, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL000000 Religion / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

18. Bernard Safran, Abdul Karim Kassem, 1959. Tempera on board, 59 × 46.3 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine. © Estate of Bernard Safran.

To bolster its image, the new regime commissioned Jawad Salim to create a monument celebrating the 1958 revolution. Salim credited ancient Mesopotamian art—notably, the suffering lions of the Nineveh reliefs that had provoked his compassion in the British Museum—with teaching him how to introduce tragedy, and his own artistic voice, into grandiose depictions of state power. “The artist has always been free to express himself, even amid the state art of Assyria,” he told his friend, the poet and critic Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. “The true artist speaks through the drama of the wounded beast.”35 Salim’s Monument of Freedom was unveiled in Tahrir Square, in the center of Baghdad, on the second anniversary of the revolution (figure 19). Its large bronze figures, set against a raised wall designed by the architect Rifat Chadirji, make a double allusion, both to the monumental relief compositions that adorned the palaces of ancient Assyrian kings and to the revolutionary aims of the newly invigorated nation. Harnessing the ancient Mesopotamian past to envision a postcolonial future, the monument expressed “Iraq’s desire for liberty since the dawn of history and the sacrifices made for its realization.”36 Though there was talk of tearing it down after the 2003 American-led invasion, the monument still stands in Baghdad as a testament to that still-unfulfilled desire.

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