For Al Mutanabbi Street

Description:	silkscreen and Flock. Edition of 6. I was invited to make a print entitled ‘For Al Mutanabbi Street’ Where is Al Mutanabbi street exactly? What is the history behind this conflict? What about Assyrian culture? How did borders get split up? I had so many questions.I had seen the war, the bombings, the army and the oil refineries on the TV. My personal impressions of Baghdad were from children’s story books; flying carpets and the glamorous Hollywood images of The Thief of Baghdad.I wanted to use a medium that would reflect layers so that the printing process could reflect, in some way, the layers of events behind the conflict in Iraq. I chose screen printing because in can incorporate many layers. I would be like a detective collecting information and laying it down.A map was my starting point. This would show me exactly the area where the street of book sellers had been. The internet provided many maps of a city divided by different ethnic groups. I chose an old map. A map needs a base to stand its streets and houses on. I had already been creating work for an exhibition called ‘paper memories’ where I had collected rubbings from tree stumps, bark, paving stones, floors and natural surfaces. Surfaces that have not changed for thousands of years.I had been working on a series entitled ‘For…’ as part of the paper memories exhibition. ‘For’ commemorated personal and important events that happened for me in 2014. During this time my brother died of cancer. I wanted to make a piece of work entitled ‘For David’ to help me cope with the loss, it felt right to make ‘For Al Mutanabbi Street’ part of this series.So my flying carpet map with its base of natural textures from the ground was starting to come together. If you look very carefully you will see that the very first texture to be printed are broken bark stripes of red green white and black the colours of the Iraq flag hidden mostly by the other layers.My next break through was visiting the British museum and seeing the winged human headed lions known as Lamassu from the palace of Ashurnasirpal 11 that has been brought from Iraq by Layard and Rassam less than a hundred years ago. These statues had guarded the city for centuries so they had to be brought into the print together with a lost flip flop and some broken glasses as a book seller had fled the current dispute. Loss and fragility started to become and important part of the print.Looking at the YV and internet the bullet holes on the buildings were a stark reminder of what it must be like to live in Baghdad now. On my print each bullet is frozen in mid air. Where would they fall? Blue for a boy or pink for a girl. (I made a few prints with pink bullets just to see how it felt).The print needed a title in Aramaie. Google translate did not fit the bill so a friend Habiba from Morocco stepped in and wrote in her beautiful hand to title the piece. Finally there were the men who had done so much to destroy Baghdad. They would fly on my carpet. The visitors from afar Hulagu Khan one of Genghis Khan’s sons destroyed the city of Baghdad in 1260. President Bush’s greed for oil and power in the 1990s has caused much destruction. Iraqis like Sadam Hussain and an IS fighter’s earned a place on my portraits of bad men on the map.I printed these portraits and the map as a final layer with Flock which is similar to dust. It has a fragile quality and makes a big impact as it sits on the surface.
Origin:	2015
Created By:	Felce, Christine
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Publisher:	Gloucestershire Printmakers Co-op (London, UK)
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/1144
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	artists book art bookworks

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