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Making Nothing from Something: Historicized Satire in Adel Abidin's "Welcome to Baghdad" (2006)
Abstract
I examine the 2006 artwork "Abidin Travels - Welcome to Baghdad" by Iraqi-born artist Adel Abidin as a critique of contemporary forms of living during wartime. For this work, the artist designed a spoof travel agency whose sole destination is Iraq, simulating the agency interface for various exhibition settings by producing video clips, leaflets, posters, brochures, interactive computer screens, and even a tickets booking facility. I discuss how the work highlights the ironies of 'liberated' daily life in Baghdad by purporting to offer Iraq's (already expropriated) natural and cultural resources to audiences in an art biennial setting, itself a site for international tourism. Through social anthropology's insight into the intimate links between the ideological expansion of modern society and modern mass leisure, especially international tourism and sightseeing, I analyze how the piece manipulates viewers' habituated tourist behaviors. I also explore its similarity with satirical works produced for Third Worldist print media in the 1960s; the pairing of the textual clichés of tourist propaganda with the opposing visual clichés of images of decimation has a historical precedent in radical cultural practices. In suggesting multiple genealogies for Abidin's 'postproduction' of the cheerful tropes of the sightseeing industry, I am most interested in the ways they work together to deconstruct current symbols of power, as well as their position within the new identity politics of the contemporary art world.
Discipline
Art/Art History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Iraq
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries