25 October 2026 — 6 February 2027

What Lingers in the Artist Mind: Experiments and Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group

Curated by Nada Shabout, drawing on Mathaf's collection of Iraqi modern art

Curated by Nada Shabout, What Lingers in the Artist Mind presents artworks and archival materials that contextualise the activities of one of the Arab world's most influential art collectives, the Baghdad Modern Art Group (Jamaat Baghdad lil Fann al-Hadith). Founded in 1951 by Iraq's two most influential artists, Jewad Selim (1919–61) and Shakir Hassan Al Said (1925–2004), the group set out to negotiate modern art between Baghdad as a centre of production and the rest of the world. It drew both on the history of its home city, an Abbasid capital whose lineage reaches back to the ancient civilisations of the Fertile Crescent, and on its own age as expressed in modernism. The group grew to include many of Iraq's leading visual artists and architects, and its influence reached well beyond its active years and borders, continuing to shape the Iraqi art scene today. Yet although the group is known by name and its manifesto has been translated and published several times in the past decade, no exhibition or publication has until now examined its history in depth. The exhibition sets out to historicise the group, its aesthetics and its legacy by offering visual and textual context. It follows the group's development through the evolving work of its two leaders and the contributions of its original members, traces changes in membership over its first decade and the efforts to continue after Selim's untimely death, and maps the group's exhibition history. It also considers the group's impact on later generations through teaching and through its presence in the work of successor groups that challenged its philosophies, such as the New Vision Group and lesser-studied collectives like al-Mujaddidin (1965). Relationships between the artists, as colleagues and teachers, are explored as the path by which their ideas reached today's 'Eighties Generation' of Iraqi artists, most of whom now live in the diaspora, a further loss to Iraq's cultural life. What Lingers in the Artist Mind also reflects on the effects of war and instability in Iraq and the resulting loss of archives, which makes it difficult to reconstruct the group's history beyond the fragmented accounts left in Arabic by Al Said and by the group's champion, the Palestinian critic Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. The 2003 US-led invasion caused massive and at times irreversible cultural damage and institutional dismantling. Some paintings known to have been made have been lost to theft or severe damage, and the surviving archival record points to documentation that has yet to be found. The exhibition acknowledges these absences and attempts to represent them, so that it can be read through its gaps and fragments as much as through the works on view. Finally, the exhibition offers a space for critical inquiry that will generate further study of the group, situating it and its members within the history of Iraqi art and global modernism. Now in its third iteration, it builds on the research behind the earlier All Manner of Experiments exhibitions and draws on Mathaf's extensive collection of Iraqi art to open new historical connections and shifts, presenting fresh stories and charting further possibilities for the art history of the region. Entry is free with museum admission.

Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art