Ibrahim Rashid (b. 1957) is a multidisciplinary Iraqi artist whose work explores the socio-political and psychological aftermath of war. Emerging from 1980s Baghdad as an illustrator and war witness, his practice examines the human body as a site of memory, violence, and survival, often fusing symbolic imagery, anthropomorphism, and myth. His work spans painting, drawing, and video, addressing biopower, displacement, and the lingering effects of surveillance and conflict. Internationally recognized, his work has been shown at venues such as the Mori Contemporary Art Museum (Tokyo), Darat Al Funun (Amman), and MAI Gallery (Montréal), and includes public projects like Looking for Oxygen in Canada.

Hamlet in Prehistoric Times: To Be or Not to Be!, Baghdad, 1980.

Nour Daher: To begin, how do you identify as an artist today — how would you describe your process?

Ibrahim Rashid: I see my practice as an act of reconstruction, collecting, layering, and transforming experiences shaped by a life between past experiences and memories. Growing up under a totalitarian regime in Iraq, I — like many artists of my generation — faced censorship and the threat of imprisonment for expressing dissent through art. These early encounters, particularly with creative repression shaped both the content and the method of my practice. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, I learned how to speak through image, how myth, allegory, and irony could carry meaning when truth could not be spoken aloud. My large-scale woodcut mural Unknown Epic (1980), an eight-meter panorama of bodies transformed by conflict, was removed by the authorities within a day, only to receive the Iraqi Critics’ Association Award five years later. That experience taught me how power seeks to control the image — and how art endures through metaphor. Over time, my practice evolved into what I call the “anatomy of memory,” a process of dissecting and reassembling bodies to recall. Engraving or tracing old images feels almost surgical: I cut, uncover, and stitch, performing an autopsy of a past. Nothing ever feels finished. A drawing might rest for years before resurfacing as a print, a film, or painting. My studio, in that sense, is less a workshop than a field hospital for memory.

Green Night, slideshow and video installation, projected simultaneously in loop on two adjacent walls, 600 x 400 cm, Toronto, Canada, 2011

ND: Your work spans painting, illustration, video, installation, and performance. How do you decide which medium best suits a particular idea?

IR: The subject chooses its medium; each material speaks its own language and temperament. After leaving Baghdad at the start of the Second Gulf War in 1990, I began painting abstract landscapes in Sweden but soon realized that the stillness of acrylic paint couldn’t hold the distance between the two worlds I inhabited. That realization led me to video and installation, spaces where sound, movement, and time let memory take on different dimensions.

In those works, landscapes merged with the domestic; kitchens, water, birds, gestures, blurring the line between inner and outer worlds. When a project is rooted in archival research or history, I return to the woodcut: carving into wood feels like excavating a buried record, each incision a trace of the past transferred into ink. Printmaking remains central because it mirrors how memory operates, layered, repetitive, and open to transformation. The act of drawing, transferring, carving, inking, and printing is like keeping a diary: a slow accumulation of thought and feeling. Painting, by contrast, feels like diving into the sea; it can be unpredictable, full of accidents and discovery. I often return to black and white, not for simplicity, but because it contains both light and loss. What matters is not variety, but how each material can uniquely hold imagination.

ND: Much of your work — especially in Big Bang and Looking for Oxygen — confronts bodily fragility and physical struggle. What draws you to the body as a central site of exploration?

IR: My interest in bodies began early, with childhood visits to the Iraq Museum in the 1960s, where Mesopotamian figures seemed to carry centuries of unspoken history. Their forms had more to tell than what could be seen.

The body, or rather bodies, entered my work in the 1980s, as I began to explore their resilience, vulnerability, and capacity to remember. I was drawn to Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void for its defiance of gravity and its poetic risk, and to post-war images of mechanized flesh that treated the body as a machine. I began drawing shadows of bodies in black and white, filled with a sense of nihilism, and later published them in the press. Encouraged by my mentor, the pioneering Iraqi painter Faiq Hassan, I transformed these studies into large oil paintings titled The Inverted Trick. One day, after finishing one of the canvases, I flipped it upside-down to hide it; the figure plunged into darkness, revealing itself even more than before.

The scale of the human body resonated deeply when I stood in the desert as a soldier, where the vastness of the horizon made time and direction dissolve. During the war, I worked near a medical unit on the frontlines and handled soldiers’ X-rays. Those ghostly images — bones and organs marked by injury — revealed an invisible anatomy of survival. Since then, I have seen the body as both a public and private archive, a site where personal and collective histories converge.

Big Bang, a series produced during COVID, grew out of this — the body as both archive and battlefield. Here, human, animal, and mechanical forms merge across time, blending myth and lived experience. Each figure bears the tension between strength and fragility, presence and disappearance. My aim is not to glorify the body but to show it as a container through which history and emotion are transmitted.

Big Bang I, details, acrylic on canvas, 178 x 180 cm, 2022

ND: You began as an illustrator in Baghdad in the 1980s, during a time of immense political control. How did your early experiences in Iraq shape your visual language?

IR: The political climate of the 1980s made it impossible to speak freely. Censorship was absolute, and dissent was a crime. That reality pushed me toward drawing in the press as a way to express what language could not. The hand, in particular, made its appearance in several illustrations — its gestures and silences became recurring symbols of power, freedom, fragility, and collectivity. Illustration became a coded language for those who could read between the lines.

I was part of a small circle of editors and publishers who risked everything to keep images in print; many did not survive. Those years taught how silence can speak, and how contrast and metaphor become forms of survival. It was the first time I began to use bodies as forms of language. Black and white, figure and void — these were my visual strategies under creative repression. The psychological weight of censorship shaped our language permanently. I learned that art could transform facts into riddles and become a witness. Though these illustrations were born in Iraq, their questions of war, displacement, ecology, and fragile freedoms remain universal.

Unknown Epic, newspaper and magazine illustrations, 1980-1989

ND: Do you come from a family of artists? If not, what first led you to pursue art as a career, and how has it served your life over the years?

IR: My family was more political and literary than artistic, filled with stories of revolutionaries driven by justice that shaped my moral imagination. My grandparents’ stories of struggle and justice became living legends, teaching me that history is never fixed but always in motion. As a teenager, I drew on walls and in schoolbooks — perhaps a way of discovering that art could be both rebellion and reflection.

In 1975, I joined Tariq al-Shaab (“People’s Path”), Iraq’s only Marxist newspaper, where I met poets and thinkers who became my cultural family. When the paper was banned and its contributors persecuted, I learned the fragility of free expression. Later, working with poets Shafiq al-Kamali and Hamid Saeed at Afaq Arabiya — one later assassinated, the other exiled — I witnessed both the creative potential and the danger of working under control.
Their stories became part of mine. Over time, art and life merged into a single practice — from Baghdad to Sweden after the Second Gulf War, and later to Canada.

ND: How has living in exile impacted your relationship with art-making? Do you see displacement as a conscious theme you return to, or does it surface more intuitively?

IR: Exile gives a double distance, from the land left behind and from the one newly inhabited. It is not an emptiness but a charged space where memory and forgetting, belonging and estrangement, constantly wrestle. Out of that tension, a language emerges, where every image carries two meanings: origin and transformation. Alienation deepens this condition. It surfaces when language detaches from instinct, when words and images belong to neither here nor there. Yet even this fracture opens the door to invention. The inability to belong becomes a fertile ground for creating hybrid forms that move swiftly between places and histories. Displacement appears both consciously and intuitively, through blurred horizons, erased maps, and fragmented silhouettes that echo the instability of memory itself. Exile has expanded my vocabulary and taught me that no destiny is isolated; the wounds of one community reverberate across all borders.

ND: Who are some artists, thinkers, or movements, past or present, that have most influenced your practice?

IR: During my studies, I was captivated by Rembrandt, first introduced by Faiq Hassan. He showed me how to build layers of color in darkness, teaching that within Rembrandt’s shadows lies hidden light, a world of doubt and secrets. Once, he painted me a portrait in Rembrandt’s palette of antique blacks, browns, and grays, where darkness reveals itself.

I also studied under the Polish professor Roman Artymowski, a central figure in modern Iraqi printmaking, who introduced me to Goya, revealing the transformative power of black as a force that absorbs and reshapes meaning.

Later, in Sweden and Canada, I closely examined the work and ideas of Joseph Beuys, particularly his New York performance “I Want to Open the Window of the Wound Again…” — a monologue of war memories, a ritual of purification and liberation. Art here can be therapy, protest, and healing.

I Dive into The Well Of My Body, Acrylic on canvas, 200 x 160 cm, 2016

ND: Your practice often blurs the line between personal narrative and collective experience. Do you see yourself as documenting shared histories, or as expressing your own emotions and inner life?

IR: I have always felt that the boundary between personal and collective is porous. One flows into the other. My work often begins with personal memory that expands outward, connecting to shared histories shaped by displacement and transformation. I often return to my time near the Shatt al-Arab River in the early 1980s, when I watched fish rise after underwater bombings. That image, both quiet and devastating, revealed how war inscribes itself not only on bodies, but on the land as well.

In my drawings, hybrid figures emerge — part human, part animal, part plant — hovering between myth and reality. They are rooted in the ecological and cultural devastation of Iraq’s southern marshlands, but they also reflect wider human struggles. I use magical realism and satire as tools, and local myths, ancient symbols, and colonial imagery as ingredients to explore how societies under pressure can reinvent themselves.

ND: From your perspective, how is Iraq present in your work, both visually and expressively? How much of your practice is shaped by your identity as an Iraqi?

IR: Iraq is always present, not as a nation, but as a constellation of rivers, languages, and legends that shape how I and others see context. I often feel like a rooted passerby, my roots drifting through shifting landscapes. The Iraq that lives in my art is both personal and collective: a place where nature, power, and war collide; where the political seeps into the biological and leaves its trace on every living form.

When I create, I return to the farm and garden I left with my partner after the Second Gulf War — spaces that now exist only as fragments of our memories. In my large-scale drawings and installations, Iraq reappears as rivers turned black, hands branching into trees, fish suspended in air. Its presence flows through Mesopotamian myth, through the language of rain and fertility, through modern Iraqi poetry — especially Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s Rain Song, where rebirth and ruin coexist.

The garden, the river, and the body are all versions of Iraq. My art is not driven by nostalgia but by the need to translate memory, to keep its questions alive. Iraq is not the place I left; it is the ground from which I continue to imagine, rebuild, and resist forgetting.

The Inverted Trick, 400 x 1800 cm, Baghdad, 1980.

ND: Finally, in your view, how has the art world changed today, both for better and for worse?

IR: The art world today exists in paradox — more open and interconnected than ever, yet increasingly entangled with markets and speed. On one hand, artists from previously silenced contexts now have global platforms to share their work. Conversations around colonialism, migration, and ecology have entered mainstream discourse, and that widening of perspective is profoundly hopeful.

Yet visibility can also flatten complexity. The same systems that amplify art’s reach often demand consumption and spectacle. Still, I believe art remains essential — as a necessity in society, as a language of creative expression. Belonging itself has become a moving form, a network of roots across shifting grounds. Art can carry those roots; it is a rooted memory that connects worlds, resists erasure, and affirms creative expression as a fundamental right for future generations.

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