The American University of Beirut Press (AUB Press) announced the publication of a seminal new volume, The Turn to the Environment, which highlights Iraqi artist Hanaa Malallah’s artistic journey, inaugurating the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Series on Art in the Arab and Islamic Worlds—a newly launched series dedicated to critical studies of art practices and histories across the region.
This volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of theoretical texts written by Malallah during the 1990s, a decade marked by war, sanctions, and cultural isolation in Iraq. These writings offer an unparalleled window into both her evolving artistic methodology and the broader intellectual landscape of Iraqi art during a period of profound hardship.
During the late 1980s, Malallah made frequent visits to the Iraq Museum, sketching archaeological artifacts in an effort to understand their temporal resonance—the way they could simultaneously belong to the past while persisting in the present. In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, as the museum closed and Iraq became increasingly cut off from the world, Malallah turned her gaze outward, exploring the city of Baghdad as a living field of material traces. This shift led to the development of her signature technique: constructing panels from found materials, which encode an almost indecipherable language—one that communicates the essence of time itself.
The book gathers dozens of short theoretical texts Malallah published in newspapers in Baghdad and London throughout the 1990s. Together, they trace the development of her practice from a material engagement with ruins to a deeply philosophical inquiry into semiotics and logic. In doing so, the volume revisits a fundamental question in modern Iraqi art—first posed by Jewad Selim and taken up again by Shakir Hassan Al Sa’id—concerning the relationship between the modern artwork and the historical artifactual object.
The volume includes an introduction by Saleem al-Bahloly, who contextualizes Malallah’s writing both within the scope of her artistic practice and the broader history of modern art in Iraq. He also edited and collated the texts. Al-Bahloly is an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut, where he researches and teaches the history of art in the Middle East over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.