I am the cry, who will give voice to me?*

The retrospective presents the first monograph of artist Dia al-Azzawi, major modern artist of the Arab world. Showing over 500 works, in a range of media, the exhibition maps an itinerary of modernism across which history is recuperated and transfigured into means for giving form to modern life. 

Held at two locations in Doha, Mathaf: Arab Museums of Modern Art and Qatar Museums Gallery Al Riwaq, the retrospective traces a trajectory of the artist’s practice. 

The first part of the exhibition at Mathaf begins with a survey of the artist’s early engagement with historical and popular sources, in order to trace the consequences of his encounters with Arab poets, among them Mahmoud Darwish, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Saadi Youssef and Muzaffar al-Nawab. The exhibition goes on to chart the shifts that occur in his practice, in relation to the techniques of printmaking, and finally the consolidation of the relation between image and text into the daftar, a personal interpretation of the artist book form developed throughout the twentieth century.

The second part of the exhibition at Al Riwaq profiles the relation between art and politics that emerged in his practice after 1968. It traces the formation of his critical use of the human form, in response to the collapse of the Palestinian liberation movement (1970) and the artist’s experience during his last service in 1973 on the Kurdistan war front. This posture was reactivated after a period of withdrawal following the artist’s move to London, in response to the Gulf war in 1991 and to the American invasion of 2003. 

*Title of an original poem [Ana al-ṣarkha, ayatu ḥunjura taʿzifuni] by Fadhil al-Azzawi

Curated by Catherine David
Assistant Curator Leonore-Namkha Beschi

The Artist

Dia al-Azzawi (Baghdad, Iraq, 1939; lives and works between London, United Kingdom and Doha, Qatar). A socially and politically committed artist, al-Azzawi focuses on human conditions as well as the history and politics of the Arab world. His work is nourished by popular culture and folkloric mythologies, contemporary wars and the violence embedded in the history of Iraq. From Mesopotamian literature to contemporary politics, the artist’s body of work is an artistic response to both the human capacity to build civilizations and to our power of destruction.

Al-Azzawi has played a foundational role in Iraqi art movements such as the New Vision Group (1969) and the One Dimension Group (1971). He participated in multiple initiatives and exhibitions, including Contemporary Arab Graphic Art (1978), the Third World Biennial of Graphic Art (1980) and the three-part Contemporary Arab Artists (1978, 1979 and 1983).

Since the 1960s, al-Azzawi has been collaborating with prominent poets to foster the pan-Arab circulation of ideas and artistic perceptions throughout a world in conflict. His practice of working between text and image consequently subjected him to work in direct reference to the art form of the artist book, which he called the daftar. Al-Azzawi has at different times worked with oil, acrylic, terracotta, plaster, bronze and various techniques of printmaking. Over the years, he has also published a number of articles in magazines, newspapers and journals, and has curated several regional and international exhibitions, most recently My Homeland at Art Sawa in Dubai (2010).