Rheim Alkadhi: Majnoon Field

Majnoon Field is an exhibition across multiple mediums, finding its primary reference in the Majnoon oil field of southern Iraq. “Discovered” in the 1970s by a team of Brazilian prospectors, Majnoon (meaning “crazy” in Arabic) attests to a frenzied, insatiable drive for capital—and indeed its production output has been calculated for the next hundred years. The field sits astride a mine-ridden border with Iran, in a zone where corporate petrol extraction and the international weapons trade seem to conspire in a recurring theater of war.

As an exhibition, Majnoon Field seeks to understand a larger planetary condition. Upon entering the space, viewers see sculptures approximating a palm grove in the shadow of contamination; nearby audio comprises a circle of “earth-workers” announcing themselves present; in the screening room, a video documents time in Iraq’s southern marshes and adjoining farmlands as an oil well burns on the horizon; elsewhere still, an interior topography is mapped with sculptural signals for thinking, feeling, loving, remembering—that is, for justly inhabiting. Viewers are invited to push deep into the presentation.

Rheim Alkadhi is an interdisciplinary artist working under volatile conditions and constantly moving between changing cultural and social contexts. Her work opens up highly diverse perspectives on borders, migration, gender, and intimacy in a poetic manner, and prompts a questioning of visual habits. Alkadhi was born in New York, and has lived in Iraq and the United States. A graduate of the University of California Irvine and CalArts, she has presented her works at numerous art spaces and biennials, including Galerie KUB in Leipzig (2017), Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2017), Shanghai Biennale (2016), Sharjah Biennale (2015), the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane (2015), Grimmwelt Museum in Kassel (2015), the New Museum in New York (2013, 2014), Apex Art in New York (2013), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), Jerusalem Show (2012), Akbank Art Center in Istanbul (2012), Kunsthaus Graz (2011), Para/Site in Hong Kong (2011), and Cairo Biennale (2010). Recent activity includes fieldwork alongside various diasporic communities and live presentations, for example Mosul Vapor (2017) at Kunstgebäude Stuttgart, Our Current Dwelling Is Fire at Sharjah Art Foundation (2018), and Material Communities: Objects We Arrange in the Energy Field at OBI Parkplatz in Berlin (2018). Her text-based work is included in the current catalog of Natascha Süder Happelmann’s German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and her article “The Injustice of the Colonial: A Museology to Rage the Senses” is forthcoming in Third Text. Currently she is based in Berlin.

Majnoon Field is Alkadhi’s first solo exhibition in Europe. It is accompanied by a public program, a catalogue, and a short story by Haytham El-Wardany. It is curated by Aneta Rostkowska.

Temporary Gallery is a centre for contemporary art in Cologne that has existed since 2008. In 2018 it won the ADKV-ART COLOGNE Prize. It is involved in international as well as local programming and supports synergies between artistic and curatorial projects in and around Cologne. Its work evolves through a fundamental exploration of local and global socioeconomic contexts and in close collaboration with theoreticians and practitioners from multiple fields. The current program includes monthly reading sessions organized in collaboration with Texte zur Kunst dedicated to various issues of the magazine, as well as regular meetings for curators aimed at discussing and redefining curatorial practices. In autumn of 2019 the institution will present a special program dealing with television series as an artistic medium. It will reflect on series’ narrative structures, including their political aspects, as well as on web series created by artists about social inequality, commodification, the institutional flaws of the art world, and the role of artists in it. The events are accompanied by a mobile art installation by Mateusz Okoński, Marta Sala, and Dominika Szczałba-Żegleń, inspired by US television series of the 1980s and 90s. Since 2019 Temporary Gallery has been directed by Aneta Rostkowska.