by Dena Al-Adeeb

Disturbance is a visual and performative memoir presented as a triptych video art project. The piece is comprised of three videos, entitled 1990, 1980, and 2003 –– years in which the first Gulf War erupted, the Iraq-Iran war started, and the US invasion and occupation of Iraq took place. 1990, 1980, and 2003 correspond to the artist’s displacements due to the same events. Set against the absurdity of infinite war, intimate vignettes uncover memory as presence. Disturbance functions as a cartographic device, charting the interconnections between these histories and their relationship to a trilogy of personal and familial displacements. Each video in the triptych confronts ghostly remains, making transparent lived experiences of militarized dispossession, war-based migrations, and ever-evolving exilic futures.

Disturbance’s temporality and narrative are fluid: it opens with 1990, circulates to 1980, and jumps forward to 2003. The sequence of spatial, architectural, and performative signifiers marks various climactic moments in Iraq’s history, which have scored the artist’s personal life. In 1980, a woman walks away from an abandoned gas station towards a factory. Blinded by the sun, her memories of the Iraq-Iran war, Halbja genocide, and the deportation of her own family converge. In 1990, a woman sways towards an abandoned building and struggles to open its fastened doors, evoking the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and her unforeseen displacement from that latter country, the first Gulf War and her relocation to the US, and the thirteen years of sanctions resulting in the death of over a million Iraqis. In 2003, the protagonist untangles a rope in reverse in an absurd attempt to make sense of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and their disastrous aftermath. She disappears, reappears, and disappears again, signifying the everlasting impact of these past events and the impending unknown. 

Dena Al-Adeeb is a transdisciplinary artist, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. She is a Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg and Visiting Scholar at the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Al-Adeeb has exhibited her work at Art 13: London: Modern and Contemporary Art Fair; Museum of Tunisia and Galerie le Violon Bleu in Tunis; Bastakiya Art Fair in Dubai; Falaki Gallery, Mashrabia Gallery, and Darb 1718 in Egypt; and Light Work Gallery and Mana Contemporary in New York, as well as the Arab American National Museum and the National Veterans Art Museum in the United States.