Absence and Ruin In Hanaa Malallah's 'The God Marduk'

This book is an object biography that provides an analysis of a single artwork by contemporary Iraqi artist Hanaa Malallah to consider how modern Iraqi art was fundamentally altered as a result of the sanctions and wars of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first leading to a transition from the modern into the contemporary – a shift that has yet to be satisfactorily theorized. This study contextualizes Malallah’s art book The God Marduk(2008) within the artistic trajectories of the artist’s education and career in Iraq during the 1980s and 1990s. It will, furthermore, investigate Malallah’s use of the ancient past as a conduit for aesthetic and emotive expression offering an in-depth analysis through the methodology of phenomenology. The book concludes with a reflection on Iraqi art in the post-2003 period.