When asked which of Rheim Alkadhi’s artworks holds the most significance for her, Andrea Nitsche-Krupp, curator of the artist’s solo exhibition, Templates for Liberation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, points at the watermelon seeds in one of the series of sculptures titled Untitled [Contents of a Communal Space], 2024. Each sculpture, placed around the art gallery, is made from used materials including waterproof, industrial-strength coverings from trucks and lorries. These materials were found by Alkadhi in Berlin, where she lives, and were brought to the ICA to be transformed. The sculpture in question is shaped like a burlap sack, open at the top and littered inside with watermelon rinds and small seeds. For Nitsche-Krupp, in an art exhibition discussing the consequences of war on land and its people, these seeds symbolise hope. She highlights Alkadhi’s attention to detailed, calm and meticulous craftsmanship and the exhibition’s hopeful outlook on the future. STIR spoke to Alkadhi and Nitsche-Krupp about the exhibition’s curation, the poignancy of the works and their ambitions.

Rhea Mathur: Could you introduce the reader to this exhibition and explain how you began working on it?

Andrea Nitsche-Krupp: I’ve been following Rheim’s work for many years now, over a decade since first encountering a project she’d done for Documenta (13) as part of the artists’ initiative called AND AND AND. When I joined the ICA a year ago, her work quickly came to mind as the kind of practice that could find a natural home at the institution.

The exhibition encompasses two rooms, the first which focuses on material-driven sculptural installations and the second is a text and image-based reading room space. Through these mediums, Alkadhi offers a valuable perspective on the enduring destructive effects of war and colonialism exemplified by the geopolitical and environmental context of Iraq, a stand-in example among many, many more.  

Rhea: The title of this exhibition is intriguing with its choice of wording. Why did you choose the word ‘templates’?

Rheim Alkadhi: In many ways, I am frustrated by how we have been trained to understand the potential of our work as artists. If we are expected to address the urgency of our times, we should be able to affect a cohesive, unified cultural movement. What is a template? It is a model envisioning passage into a desired outcome – a future different from where we are headed.

To say art is a template is to say that art is capable of conveying to the viewer another kind of future. That is, a template proposes something concrete inside a gallery, under the current weight of devastation and denialism around us. If Palestine, especially Gaza, represents how we are expected to inhabit the earth under fascist imperatives, denialist narratives and genocidal regimes, such are the conditions against which templates in the exhibition exist as artworks.

The templates here include concepts of demilitarisation, prison/border abolition, a narrative agency of the oppressed, rights of the Indigenous/migrant/dispossessed, and a rejection of denialist mechanisms — that is, a ‘template’ proposes our liberation as a concrete aspiration across the ages of subjugation.

Rhea: Can you talk about the first room which Andrea described as ‘material-driven’? Where are these materials from and what do they signify?

Rheim: Industrial transport tarps are made of PVC, a chemical derivative from the refining process of fossil fuel extraction; the material is sourced from the depths of the earth. These tarps were used on transport vehicles and after sufficient wear and tear, they were cast off. Especially of note is their highly mobile past lives; they have all crossed great distances whilst shielding goods from weather and damage in the distribution of global capital. In the end, the tarp is a plastified reification of the earth itself; each tarp not only represents but is a manifestation of exploited ground, depleted field and wasted planetary expanse. I have seen them in different iterations everywhere in the world. Originating from militarised, corporate-extracted depths, the tarps exemplify the oppressive planetary basis of expulsion and forced migration.

Rhea: What does the reading room bring to this exhibition?

Rheim: Study tables, copious reading materials culled from the National Archives, a book display linking racial science with British and American imperial projects and the resistance arising out from the confines of the colonial narrative—these are all elements I knew would be included from the start. I also immediately knew the reading room’s title would be The Land and the People. Later, we decided to include some existing references from the book Majnoon Field Guide, like a map and the narrative account of the Transynchronic Rebels, which represent workers, radicalised minorities and women who defied norms by their rebellion to unrecorded insurgencies. Andrea was a true and trusted collaborator in the process of considering, collecting and presenting the material to ICA’s viewership in an exhibition space that makes sense.

Andrea: The reading room places the sculptures squarely in conversation with Britain’s colonial history in Iraq (fitting for the ICA’s location!) and is stocked with archives ready to be rifled through. These are governmental agreements and memos, mostly from the period of 1916-1922 in which Britain jockeyed for its position in the region of modern-day Iraq and Palestine and in them, the insidious language of imperial ambition is quickly apparent.

These archival accounts are put in dialogue with institutionally commissioned American volumes such as Henry Field’s Anthropology of Iraq (2005) and related publications (c. 1935-1952), which give another perspective on a specific kind of dehumanising effort towards a colonial objective, ultimately. Within this space, Alkadhi seeds evidence of another account, an envisioned rebel element that appears through tender portraiture, narrative texts and occurrences within the archival documents. These rebels reclaim representation, suggesting countless unrecorded insurgencies. Their presence in this feels just as plausible as, perhaps more reasonable than the historical records on view.

Rhea: The previous exhibition at the ICA was Aria Dean’s Abattoir, U.S.A.! How do you think Alkadhi’s exhibition converses with past ICA exhibitions and the gallery's location in London?

Andrea: In building the exhibition programme at the ICA, I’m trying to play to its historic strengths: surprising, experimental and critical art practices embedded in contemporary thought and cultural production in addition to and beyond aesthetics. Aria Dean and Rheim Alkadhi both work across mediums and they share that interdisciplinary approach. Though a thread throughout ICA exhibition history has been a special responsiveness to this place; the ICA is smack on The Mall in the seat of the establishment and is a fitting platform from which to question accepted norms in art or our society today.

‘Rheim Alkadhi: Templates for Liberation’ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts is on view from June 11 - September 8, 2024.