The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 54

It Is What It Is
Conversations about Iraq Jeremy Deller
Since the start of the Iraq War, I’ve been obsessed by events in
the Middle East. I undertook the project It Is What It Is:
Conversations about Iraq to plug the gaps in my knowledge and
satisfy the arguments that had been circling in my head. In the UK,
military and civilian life is segregated. It’s not common to meet
soldiers in everyday life and there are few Iraqi refugees given
asylum in the country [UK]. I had read a ton of books and articles
about the war , but short of going to Iraq itself, I knew there would
never be a substitute for meeting someone who had actually
lived or been there. Hearing “I was kidnapped” or “My father was
killed” in the media is very different from meeting someone face
to face, to whom such an atrocity has happened. The intensity of a
meeting, of a simple conversation can change our understanding.
So the goal of the It Is What It Is exhibition was to offer visitors
unmediated discussion and conversation with people who had
had specific experience of Iraq, rather than just opinions. Often,
the people with the strongest opinions are the ones who have
no experience. The show started in New York and then went
on the road, literally. I travelled through the southern states of
America with veteran sergeant, Jonathan Harvey, and Iraqi artist,
Esam Pasha, and, in tow, a bomb-destroyed car that made up
my installation piece Baghdad, 5 March 2007 – the conversation
piece from hell. The mangled bodywork had been salvaged from
the rubble of 5 March 2007 Al-Mutanabbi Street car bombing that
killed over thirty innocent victims and injured hundreds more.
Al-Mutanabbi Street, a mixed Sunni-Shia community named
after the celebrated ninth-century poet, was the cultural heart
of Baghdad. For centuries, artistic life and intellectual curiosity
thrived in this bustling hub of booksellers, stationers, tea shops
and cafés. The blast was seen as an assault on contemporary Iraqi
culture and the perpetrators remain unknown. People often ask
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The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom

me, “Why the car?” A car is such a sacred thing in the American
consciousness, and here was one destroyed in a war zone.
Whenever you watch the news and there’s been a bombing, you
don’t see the bodies, you see a car. It becomes a replacement for
the body, so in that respect, our car became a body.

CARA Fellows
Deller’s People with direct experience
In 2012, The Hayward Gallery mid-career retrospective of
Jeremy’s work Joy in the People included his installation piece
Baghdad, 5 March 2007. Two Iraqi CARA Fellows,
Dr May Witwit and Waleed Al Bazoon, volunteered to take
on the role of ‘people with direct experience’ sharing their
personal stories with the exhibition visitors.
In the words of May, “I tried to fire their imaginations,
bringing the event to life by asking them to remember the
people in the car who had been killed in this tragic bombing”.
May is the co-author of ‘Talking About Jane Austen in Baghdad:
The true story of an unlikely friendship’ (Penguin, 2010)
Waleed is the author of a book of poetry ‘The War on Idigna’ (2011)

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