But that acute loss, as the scholar Zainab Bahrani notes in the catalog to “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011,” on view at MoMA PS1, had deeper origins. The UN-managed economic embargo that starved the country of crucial resources from 1990 to 2003 led not only to humanitarian disasters like rising infant mortality, but also to scarcities of basic art materials and instruments. In the chaotic aftermath of the 2003 invasion of the region, the National Museum of Iraq and countless archaeological sites around the country were plundered by Iraqi citizens and foreign soldiers and contractors; thousands of artifacts ended up in private collections abroad. And in the cataclysmic years of war that followed, many of Iraq’s contemporary artists also left their homeland. They were compelled into exile both by profound insecurity and by the disappearance of the spaces and means for making art. Because of the embargo, artists began making their own paper. This urgent creative endeavor contributed to the emergence, during the blockade period, of dafatir—art books that chronicled the continuity of violence while testifying to the possibility of cultural survival or renewal.
Source : The Art of Neverending Wars
