Michael Rakowitz's survey exhibition "Allspice" opened at the Acropolis Museum in Athens in 2025, featuring works that explore Iraqi cultural heritage, displacement, and the politics of looting. The show includes his series "The invisible enemy should not exist" (2007–), which reconstructs artifacts looted from Baghdad's National Museum of Iraq after the 2003 US invasion using Arabic food wrappers and newspapers, as well as a video work documenting his effort to import Iraqi dates labeled with their true country of origin for the first time in three decades.
The exhibition matters because it directly challenges Western-centric narratives of civilization by reminding visitors that Mesopotamia predates ancient Greece as the cradle of writing, the wheel, and agriculture. It also draws a powerful parallel between the looting of Iraqi antiquities and the ongoing restitution dispute over the Parthenon Marbles, which the Acropolis Museum was built to house. By pairing an artist of Iraqi-Jewish heritage with a museum founded to demand the return of looted artifacts, the show becomes a joint statement against imperialist appropriation and a call for historical justice.