When we met, you were a teenager. If you hadn’t told me your age I wouldn’t have guessed. You were committed fully, even then, to making work, to physically, quietly, putting down on canvas and in words the impossible investigations of your heart. You said you wanted to create a mural in Baghdad. To its people, to what they’ve been through. To honour those whose lives were taken and those who survived without them. But who could create a work to encompass the breadth of the attacks, the enormity of global imperial war, the immeasurable residue that lives inside generations?

Instead of trying to map the impossible, you map—in text and in colour, the impossibilities of a beginning and an end neatly tied up as memorial or testament. Instead of hiding from the enormity of the task (how to express the infinite complexities of this Iraqi experience?) you present, precisely—what it means for a mind to have to find ways to understand a world both intimate and strange that regards your home, your family, your neighbourhood as prey. You circle the vultures and stand with the carcass.

The question comes up every so often. Are there good artists in Iraq anymore? I decline to answer, deflecting their questions with some of my own. I think of your work and how it would slice that question into a hundred pieces. Not because you are a young artist from Iraq and your work has been deemed “good,” but because your work refuses the underlying violence of the question. Your letters and drawings don’t tell us what is good or what is worthy. Instead you compose a resistance. A resistance to the idea of a documented or cohesive history even as your work becomes a clue inside of it. You understand that the ecosystem of knowing is itself broken, and so you capture that unknowable terrain; the aftermath of survival.