Three Iraqi Female Artists Coming to Minneapolis for Not About Bombs Artists’ Talk and Reception on March 2

The Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP) is pleased to announce that it will bring three Iraqi women artists from its Not About Bombs exhibit to Minneapolis for an Artists’ Talk and Reception onMarch 2, 2012. The three artists are Dena Al-Adeeb, Sundus Abdul Hadi and Tamara Abdul Hadi, all of whom currently reside in North America.

The free event will take place at 7:00 p.m. on March 2 at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. Curator Tricia Khutoretsky will host a discussion with the artists regarding their work, experiences, and perspectives on the current situation facing Iraqi women. There will also be time for audience questions and a reception with the artists.

Not About Bombs features contemporary work by Iraqi female artists. The exhibit opened on February 3 with more than 300 attending a reception at Intermedia Arts, and will run through March 3. Al-Adeeb, Abdul Hadi and Abdul Hadi will also participate in a session at the Nobel Peace Prize Forum at Augsburg College on March 3 with Minneapolis artist Camille Gage, “Illustrating the Cost of War.”

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Read about the artists:  Artists Respond to a Decade of Conflict

 Sundus Abdul Hadi was born to Iraqi parents in the UAE in 1984 and raised inMontreal,Canada. As a painter and multi-media artist, Abdul Hadi works around the concepts of media representation and subverting existing images. Her work has been featured and exhibited in the UAE, Palestine, Iraq, Australia, Canada and the US, with solo shows of her multimedia series “Warchestra” held inToronto and Ottawa.

Tamara Abdul Hadi, Sundus’ sister, has worked for Reuters and the New York Times as a photojournalist and has also published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, to name a few.  Alongside photojournalism, Abdul Hadi created and gave photography workshops in Lebanon and Palestine, with the goal of empowering women and children through creative arts. Abdul Hadi is a founding member of the photography collective Rawiya, which consists of 6 women photographers based in theMiddle East.

Dena Al-Adeeb is an artist/scholar born in Baghdad, Iraq. Forced out of Iraq just before the Iraq/Iran War in 1980, she and her family escaped to Kuwait until the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, when she was forced to relocate to San Francisco. Her work explores the mappings of imagined and real memories, architecture objects and cityscapes, and has been presented in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland, Michigan, Sweden, Cairo, Dubai, and Tunisia.

 In a review of the exhibit for City Pages, Sheila Regan writes, “In a stunning photograph by Tamara Abdul Hadi, titled My Window, seven female figures all in black veils stand in line to receive their monthly widow’s pension. In Iraq, there are a million widows, the majority of whom have lost their husbands during the war. Hadi’s stark, black-and-white image eloquently presents this reality. Like the other Iraqi women artists featured in Not About Bombs, she offers an alternative viewpoint that shows how Iraqi women have survived in the aftermath of the violence.”

 Not About Bombs builds on two previous exhibits presented by IARP, The Art of Conflict in 2010 and Navigating the Aftermath in 2011.   

To support the exhibit with a donation or to learn more, visit http://kck.st/yJ4Tib. We need to raise enough money to cover the three artists’ airfare, hotel, and meals, as well as the event costs.

 This activity is funded, in part, by appropriations from the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the State’s general fund, and its arts and cultural heritage fund that was created by a vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

This presentation is a part of Intermedia Arts’ Catalyst Series.  Exhibit sponsors include the Human Rights Program at the University of Minnesota, Saffron Restaurant and Lounge, Bibelot, Twin Cities Daily Planet, Minnesota Women’s Press, and Bryant Lake Bowl.

 About the Iraqi and American Reconciliation Project (IARP) | http://reconciliationproject.org.

IARP supports reconciliation between Iraqis and Americans through art, education, health and cultural exchangeprograms. IARP provides opportunities for Iraqis and Americans to engage in artistic expression and dialogue around war and its consequences. Partnering with the Muslim Peacemaker Teams (MPT) in Iraq, IARP also provides opportunities for Americans to directly support the basic needs of Iraqis through water, sanitation, and healthcare projects, and facilitates the sharing of expertise among Iraqi and American professionals to help rebuild a country devastated by war.

IARP Websites:

http://reconciliationproject.org http://waterforpeaceproject.org http://navigatingtheaftermath.org

416 E. Hennepin Ave•Suite116•Minneapolis,MN55414•USA

Tel:952.545.9981• Fax:952.545.9981• Email: info@reconciliationproject.org