The ICA’s boxy gallery is a drab setting for Alkadhi’s sculptures formed from vast sheets of shipping tarps and covers. Tarred polyester canvases stretched on the horizon serve as heroic history paintings. Crumpled rolls of PVC oilcloth adorned with scrap steel and consumed by flame-red wounds occupy much of the floor space. They serve as 1:1 geological models of a land that bore them. A single fabric hanging conceals the invigilator’s seat. This petrochemical artefact betrays a sign of life as it moves with the fan’s oscillation. On closer inspection, however, the green leaves sprouting from it turn out to be plastic too.
The adjacent reading room gathers archival and fictional knowledge artefacts. Yellowed scientific journals, photographs, and documents from Iraq – the artist’s birthplace – hide their content in locked vitrines. They are implicitly discredited by their imperialist provenance. A parallel display, meanwhile, invites visitors to freely explore made-up stories of the Iraqi nation that had been heroically rebellious and succeeded against the colonial British force.
The thing is, it hadn’t. This archive’s insurgent life force is once again no more than a scrap of dummy plastic. Its shape more closely matches the institution’s explicit political aspirations than Alkadhi’s more sincere sculpture. When truth and artifice are so bluntly opposed, what use is aesthetics?
