Mesopotamia to modern art

It's an extraordinary remnant of history: a Babylonian-period contract of adoption with each witness' name impressed upon it with a decorative stamp.

The surviving fragment from a civilisation that goes back to 2000BCE is one of 40 antiquities spanning six millennia that will be on display in custom-made vitrines alongside contemporary exhibits and such everyday objects as jugs and sieves from Iraq at the Venice Biennale.

Started more than a century ago, Venice Biennale is the Mecca for contemporary art and serves as a model for other biennales across the world. The 57th edition will open this May and run until November. The Ruya Foundation, which has commissioned the National Pavilion of Iraq, is eager to showcase the nation's talent by juxtaposing contemporary exhibits — installations to multimedia works — with those from centuries ago in its exhibition Archaic.

“Archaic will explore the different ways in which Iraq’s ancient past has affected its modern and contemporary visual languages, examining the opportunities and restrictions presented to the nation by its immense ancient inheritance, in the context of today’s fragile reality,” says Tamara Chalabi, the Foundation's co-founder.

Istanbul-based Chalabi held discussions with London-based archaeologist Lamia Gailani-Werr and Qais Hussein Rashid, the director of the Department of Antiquities at the Iraq Museum, for over six months before deciding on the 40 antiquities that will make the journey from Baghdad to Venice. Most will be seen outside Iraq for the first time even as some of these were looted in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s regime and subsequently returned. “The criteria were many – linked to historic periods that correspond to the notion of the archaic, to the visuality of the objects, their aesthetic qualities and the themes within the archaic that the contemporary artists have been commissioned to work with,” adds Chalabi.

The contemporary works by eight artists, six of who are specially commissioned for the Biennale, can be viewed through the prism of seven themes – water, earth, the hunt, writing, music, conflict and exodus. These themes, the curators feel, are “a precursor to any civilisation”. Thus a circular clay text used to teach how to write in the Babylonian period will rub shoulders with contemporary artist Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s exhibit that combines drawings with animation, interrogating the way Iraqi school text books relay the narratives of the country’s past. Or a cylinder seal depicting three parallel scenes from Gilgamesh – the 4,000-year-old Mesopotamian poem Epic of Gilgamesh is considered to be the world's first great work of literature – will serve as a stark parallel to filmmaker Luay Fadhil’s film depicting a man who visits one of many scribes with a makeshift office outside public buildings drawing up official documents, in an attempt to communicate with his recently deceased wife.