Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz has opened his first major survey exhibition in Norway, titled "Proxies for Poets and Palaces," at the Stavanger Art Museum. The show features eight new reliefs from his long-running series *The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist*, which recreates artifacts looted from Baghdad's Iraq Museum using cardboard, Arabic newspapers, and food packaging, alongside older works like the 2017 film *The Ballad of Special Ops Cody*.
Rakowitz's work provides a powerful and explicit contemporary artistic response to war, displacement, and cultural destruction, themes that have become less common in mainstream contemporary art. The exhibition's timing is significant, coinciding with renewed geopolitical tensions and American military posturing, and it underscores the artist's ongoing project to memorialize loss and explore the complex legacies of conflict through fragile, everyday materials.