The Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in New York State has opened "All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group," the first major US survey of the influential Iraqi collective. Organized by curators Nada Shabout, Tiffany Floyd, and Lauren Cornell, the exhibition brings together 64 works by 30 artists—including Dia al-Azzawi, Jewad Selim, and Mohammed Ghani Hikmat—spanning from 1951 to 2023. Many pieces have not been publicly displayed in decades, and the show draws from private collections and major Arab institutions such as the Barjeel Art Foundation, the Dalloul Art Foundation, the Ibrahimi Collection, and Qatar Museums. The exhibition also addresses the devastating loss of modern Iraqi art during the Iraq War, with an estimated 85% of 8,000 works from the Saddam Arts Centre looted or damaged.
This exhibition matters because it reclaims a vital chapter of post-colonial art history that has been largely overlooked in the West, while also confronting the cultural destruction wrought by the 2003 invasion. By foregrounding the Baghdad Modern Art Group's philosophy of "Istilham al turath"—seeking inspiration from heritage—the show highlights how Iraqi artists fused Western modernism with Islamic and Mesopotamian aesthetics. It also serves as a corrective to Western narratives that focus only on ancient Iraqi heritage, and as a beacon for a new generation of Iraqi artists who have been cut off from their own modern traditions. The curatorial effort to represent looted works through ephemera underscores the ongoing struggle to preserve and reconstruct Iraq's artistic legacy.