Michael Rakowitz

Based in Chicago, Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American architect, artist, chef, cultural archeologist, radio host, and many other things. This discussion took place three days before President Trump’s inauguration and one day before the Gaza ceasefire. Any redacted portions are strictly for the purposes of editing, rather than censorship, but do still question the value of free speech, while paying homage to the artist’s own lifelong interests in the values of voice, feeling, freedom and expression.

Ossian Ward: How are you doing?

Michael Rakowitz: Okay. You know, we’ve got three more days before crazy shit starts to happen here.

Ward:  Is that in the studio? Or you mean in the political sense?

Rakowitz: ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

Ward: What do you make of this last-minute ceasefire?

Rakowitz: ███████████████████████████████████

Ward: I wanted to try something a bit different and had the idea of conducting this in the form of a podcast, in homage to your work Radio Silence (2018), but that’s difficult, because that program was done in such a beautiful way. It made me think not only how good a host you are, but how important it seems to be to present your work in an authentic or professional way. You know, you’ve run the gamut from being a radio presenter, an architect and an artist, all the way to being an expert in Western sci-fi, antiquity, and archeology. Even when you’re cooking, it seems to be not just in an accessible manner, but in an authentic manner. Is that an important factor for you?

Rakowitz: For me to be invested in my work, it just has to be, you know, life. Sometimes people have called the cooking projects “performances,” which confounds me. I see it as just welcoming people in or doing something in collaboration with people.

When I was in art school it felt so liberating to learn about artists blurring that line between art and life. Maybe it meant something different to me than it did to Allan Kaprow but the lived human experience as seen through making art is one not confined to an office or a studio: it follows you wherever you go. The mind is this incredibly portable space that you can’t escape from, even when you’re trying to ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

For me, it’s important that there isn’t artifice. I can’t dissociate from who I am and what my family has given me in terms of knowledge. My grandparents were very intentional. I tell this story a lot, but I always talk about how they were, like, the first installation artists I’d ever met, because they really made sure that their house on Long Island—where my mother was raised, and where me and my brothers were raised—had all of these things on the walls and on the floors that were from Iraq and could be portals to this place that they couldn’t go back to. They were heartbroken to leave.

The kitchen was also a place where everything that came out of there was most definitely from Iraq.████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ down to the smell of the Iraqi Baharat spice mix. When I would go to a friend’s house and it wouldn’t smell of anything, you know, it felt very disorienting for me.

Ward: I like the idea that it’s an actual memory of a smell, not a false version of that memory, which is why you make actual radio shows, not false versions. I was looking back at the 2010–14 work you made about The Beatles, entitled The Breakup, which is an audio series, a film essay, and a documentary about how the group breaking up in 1969 had this corollary with, I guess, the breaking down of the Middle East and the Arab alliance at the same time. How did you arrive at the collusion of those two worlds?

Rakowitz: I try to make work about the things that I love, without being self-indulgent ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ I was invited in 2009 to make a work for a show in Jerusalem. This was like a dream come true, you know, because I’ve always wanted to do something in that city. Growing up in an Arab Jewish household, I had a very complicated relationship with Zionism and what Israel even was..██████████████████████████████████████████████

Jerusalem wasn’t the Holy City for me growing up, it was Liverpool. Being seven years old and seeing my mother crying in front of the television, led me to ask who John Lennon was—she looked at me like I was an alien. She took me upstairs to my parents’ room, where the turntable lived, and handed me Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ We had this one poetry assignment and other kids had memorized Shel Silverstein, but I was up in front of the class reciting: “I wanna be your lover, baby. I wanna be your man.”

Art suddenly spilled out into the world for me. I became obsessive. The Beatles only had twelve albums, so I started to buy the bootleg Get Back sessions, trying to find the exact moment where they all fell apart. I’m thinking about devotion and obsession as a fan, but I started to think about finding something in those recordings that aligned with what caused Jerusalem to collapse. Also, there are four separate sections of the city—the Armenian Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter—and you have John and Paul and George and Ringo. I thought that when people tuned in, they wouldn’t know if they were listening to something about politics or something about music.

Ward: You had a recent project in Gateshead, which was different, but perhaps related: instead of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, you made The Waiting Gardens of the North (2023–24), made up of olive, fig, and quince trees, all tended by local communities, again, which involved you inviting people in. And you talked about that piece as a space of refuge, but also of imagination. How do people respond?

Rakowitz: When I do projects that involve participation, I try to think very critically and rigorously about not doing too much, to allow space for new things to accumulate and grow. That’s one of the reasons I love radio so much, there’s a beautiful blindness that’s afforded by it, you’re constructing images in your own mind.Ben sent you a nice, long email about returns too.  ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ What I try to do with those projects and even with the shelters that I build every winter, is to make them in direct collaboration with the person who’s there and living with them. And they tell me what they want.

████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ The garden in Gateshead was an opportunity for asylum seekers to request plants and herbs from their own countries, it became like an anchor for them—not only to remember where they’ve left or fled from, but also where they’ve come to. In that moment they actually inherited the right to host other visitors who came to this space. This idea was inspired by Sandi Hilal, a Palestinian architect whose project The Living Room [Al-Madhafah in Arabic] talks about how, in her context, as a Palestinian in Sweden, refugees and asylum seekers are hosted by other countries, but don’t have the right to host themselves. They’re always in this limbo despite their sanctuary status, being put into hotels and other places in the outskirts that don’t have kitchens, right? So they’re beholden to the hotels for food and whatever else they need. When you take away the right to host from someone, that is actually a loss, you know? And so there’s a kind of flipping of the power, because asylum seekers are often.████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ So when local Geordies began to connect with these newly arrived neighbors, that relationship became like an unpredictable piece of soil that started to yield a lot of different kinds of growth.

Ward: That makes me think about the long tail of your work, because you’re many things in these projects: a driver, an instigator, a curator, as well as an artist—but how important is it for you that these things are then preserved in a museum? Tate Modern offered to look after the Lamassu you made for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London in 2019. Your statement was, well, ████████████████████████████████████████████████ But what does it mean for you to be entered into museum collections, into those same hallowed halls? How does that feel for you, and what does that mean in terms of the longevity of your work?

Rakowitz: Yeah, I appreciate this question a lot—it’s a position of discomfort, and a really interesting discomfort to make work from. When I’m cooking Iraqi food, there’s a flavor profile called hamid helou, which means sweet and sour. So if I make a kubbeh, which is a dumpling with a kind of fragrant spice mix, then I want the stew to be sour so that the flavors are held in a space of tension. I believe restitution is unequivocally something that should be pursued and achieved, but I’m also very interested in the impossibilities of full returns. You know that things can’t really be made whole again.

When I made the decision to reappear objects that were looted from the National Museum of Iraq [The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, (2006–)], or the friezes in my studio that come from the northwest palace of Kalhu, also known as Nimrud in the north of Iraq, which were destroyed like the Lamassu in 2015… it’s not simply about reconstruction. I’ve always wanted these objects to admit to their vulnerability. I’m fascinated, like everybody else, with 3D printing ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ but then, you can’t 3D print the DNA of the Palmyrene people who were executed by ISIS along with those objects.

There’s a whole story that I tell about the work Return (2004–), where I attempted to import Iraqi dates to the US, sitting in that empty store in Brooklyn and waiting for dates to arrive from Iraq that were labeled as products of Lebanon in order to circumvent UN sanctions. I was sitting there in this empty store, thinking about the empty museum and about those objects coming back as ghosts to haunt Western collections ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ A ghost always looks different than when they were when living, so I started to think about, you know, provenance is what gives archeology its value, ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ And so suddenly I realized that the skin that these objects should have to wear, and be made out of, were these urgent materials that will one day disappear themselves. That’s what a good ghost does—you don’t haunt very well unless you disappear, reappear, and then disappear again.

My work in a museum collection is like a disobedient object that creates new relationships to our histories and where things belong, but I can’t guarantee they’re always going to be there. They will disappear one day like a ghost.

Ward: And that’s definitely how I think about those works. They’re not just remakes. There is a kind of resistance and resilience through the reconstruction of that object and maybe within that culture. What I love about that piece with the date syrup, Return, is that the place you originally sourced the material from, Sahadi’s, where your family used to source Iraqi foods from, is still there on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ But I think the point about the objects is that you’re adding something through the material status of that object as a vessel. I don’t like to use the word “magical”—some other transformation occurs. ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ It’s a leap of imagination, it’s an emotional vessel. They also seem to me like lost people.

Rakowitz: Exactly. That is what inspired the work: thinking about where we all were, twenty-two years ago, in April of 2003, seeing those images of the museum being looted—it was the first moment of pathos that opened up in the war. Because it didn’t really matter if you were for the war or against it, everyone could agree that this was just a travesty and a catastrophe, right? This was like a loss that wasn’t just simply localized, you know, and so when the outrage about lost objects turned into an outrage about lost lives, that’s when I decided to make the work. ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ And so when I think about the surrogacy of those objects and stories it is not just about the lost objects, but about the lost Iraqi lives that can’t be reconstructed or reappeared.

Ward: The narrative here [in London] is always about the Parthenon and whether we’re going to give back the Elgin Marbles, but actually, ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ there are myriad other objects in “world” museums which don’t trigger that same discussion about restitution. I liked when you suggested that if the Lyres of Ur from the British Museum weren’t returned, then why couldn’t the Iraqi Museum have John Lennon’s guitar in return? Maybe it is not because the conditions aren’t right inside the museum, but because the principle remains that things are not being returned, whether we like it or not.

Rakowitz: That’s correct. It would be intellectually dishonest for me to say that encyclopedic museums haven’t been important to me growing up. I tell this story about how my mom brought us to the British Museum when I was ten, and she points out the wall reliefs, The Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal, and tells us that it’s the first comic book, because it’s sequential and it comes from the place that she’s from. ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ And then she said, “What is it doing here?” So that’s the relationship that I’ve had with museums ever since. But if we’re to maybe find some common ground around what an encyclopedic museum is today, and think about a museum instead based on mutual curiosities, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, you know—to maybe build from a new foundation that isn’t based on extraction and colonialism and imperialism.

Ward: That encyclopedic argument is colonial in the very idea that while we deserve these treasures all in one place, they have to be in London or New York or Paris. They can’t be every place. I was going to ask one more question related to your last New York show in which you include this amazing hybrid American Golem (2022) made up of other public monuments. But then what I also liked was, in the back was Behemoth (2022), this black version of another inflatable work of yours entitled Dull Roar (2005) which was a housing project that comes up and down, ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ But this black version seems even more sinister, like Rodin’s Balzac. It’s clearly an object that’s been canceled or removed from view. There’s been a lot of discussion about these troublesome monuments—do we rip them down, do we put them back in a different museum with a different label? █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ Where do you sit on that axis of what to do with the complicated monuments?

Rakowitz: Similar to the conversations on restitution, I want to be led by the communities that are most deeply impacted by these monuments. You know, a Columbus statue here in Chicago says something very different to me than it does to someone who is from Puerto Rico and has Taíno heritage—a child who grows up with that identity knows very well what that statue is telling them and what their place is. The conversation around recontextualization is one that really deserves to hear those voices, to allow a space for them to be enunciated and honored.

I started to see some of the urgent reactions, like how this incredibly brave Black student named Zyahna Bryant started a petition in 2016 to take down the statue of Robert E Lee. The desire to maintain and preserve these monuments is absurd when you don’t have that same desire to preserve the communities that are still fighting for liberation. As well as public redactions, I thought about the black tarp as a moment of indecision or as a deferral of any kind of decision. There is a Gestalt shape that gets created ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ but at the same time, it reminds me of what we do in Judaism when we’re mourning, when you’re sitting Shiva for a relative who’s passed away, you cover all the mirrors in black. I think about our country being in a constant state of mourning when we consider that it’s built on indigenous genocide and chattel slavery, so that seeing those monuments covered might be that constant reminder. The idea with Behemoth was similar to Dull Roar. It’s a loop in which we’re constantly constructing and then collapsing these moments. That, for me, is like American oxygen.

I support the removal of the sculpture, but when we look at graffiti on the statue of ███████████████████████ as the precipitation of grief and rage in the aftermath of the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, I think about sixty years down the line and somebody bringing their grandkid over and saying: “You see that “Fuck Racism”? I spray painted that”. Maybe we should look at these moments that are in between when the sculpture is presented and then when the sculpture is moved or removed. Like, that’s the area for us to look at, and that’s what’s to be preserved.