Shelter in the Storm: An Interview with Hanaa Malallah

By Spencer Harrison

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

*Hanaa Malallah,* She/He Has No Picture, 2019–2020. Burnt canvas collage on canvas with laser-cut brass plaques. Variable dimensions.
Image provided by the artist courtesy of MoMA and the New York Times (Walter Wlodarczyk).

Hanaa Malallah is an Iraqi born artist, researcher, and educator. Her art installation She/He Has No Picture commemorates the 1991 Al Amirrayah shelter tragedy—a bombing by the US military which killed at least 480 people. The installation is featured for the first time in its entirety in the second Veteran Art Triennial exhibition Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine, at the Chicago Cultural Center.

In the 1980s, Hanaa started developing her “ruins technique” in response to the death and destruction of her homeland caused by the wars and conflicts of western imperialism, specifically the United States. Forced to flee her country in 2007 as a refugee, Hanaa has grappled with the irony of practicing and displaying her art in the western countries responsible for the wars and her forced departure from Iraq.

Hanaa displayed a portion of the She/He Has No Picture installation at the MoMA PS1 in New York City in 2019. For the second time in the United States, Hanaa raises the question of what it means for her anti-war art to be displayed in the country responsible for the Al Amirrayah disaster and so much devastation in her homeland.

*Hanaa Malallah,* She/He Has No Picture, 2019–2020. Installation in the Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023.
Photo by Eric Perez.

Spencer Harrison (SH): In 2007 you were forced to leave Iraq and live as a refugee in the UK. How did that impact your art practice?

Hanaa Malallah (HM): It is ironic to seek refuge in the country that caused the disaster of wars which pushed me to flee Iraq. When I reached London all my war memories and trauma resurfaced when I saw the histories and war experiences that were archived in museums such as the Imperial War Museum (IWM), the National Army Museum (NAM), and the British Museum (BM). Our war and the physical experiences of violence have been reduced to stories and artifacts in these museums.

I often reflect on how my personal history and my career as an artist were completely wiped out and erased when I reached London—I had to start again from scratch. However, I gained some recognition in London as an Iraqi Middle Eastern artist, and ironically my works were collected by the IWM and the BM.

*Hanaa Malallah,* Ashes, 2012. Multiple layers of burnt canvas, ashes, and oil on canvas.
Courtesy of the artist.

SH: Can you speak more about your “ruins technique” and art as resistance to war, militarism, and colonialism? How has the ruins technique changed since its origins in the 80s?

HM: I coined this term—ruins technique—in 2007, when I reached London. It reflects my process of destroying, tearing, and burning materials in order to create art. I always question where this comfort of destroying materials comes from. Sometimes I feel I am celebrating my survival by destroying materials. However, the concept of the ruins technique resides in the process of destroying the materials and my physical act of making artwork. And the performative marks of that process is the work. That also may explain my affinity for archaeology, especially ancient Mesopotamian landscape, as I reach the essence of ruins.

*Hanaa Malallah,* Ruins Roar, 2013–2016. Multiple layers of burnt canvas on canvas.
Courtesy of the artist.

SH: The She/He Has No Picture installation is on display in the Surviving the Long Wars exhibition. Can you speak about the meaning and importance of this work?

HM: The She/He Has No Picture project was created to commemorate the Al Amirrayah shelter disaster and my visit to the shelter ruins two or three months after it was bombed. The shelter was destroyed by two smart laser-guided missiles in February 1991, in the pre-dawn, incinerating 480 people. When I visited the ruined shelter it was dark, only dimly lit by the hole in the ceiling made by the missile. That may explain why all the project’s canvas portraits are dark and monochromatic. At the shelter, a toxic smell of smoke and charred bodies permeated the air—human remains had been fused into the very fabric of the interior by the intense heat of the explosions. There was no way to take photos at that time as there were no smartphones, or even cameras, as we lived under heavy sanctions. But the images were deeply etched in my mind and have haunted me over the years. In 2018, around twenty-eight years after the shelter visit, I was suddenly ready to put the disaster into artwork.

The project title was derived from a small booklet published by the Iraqi government that listed the victims’ names. Just one hundred of those names were accompanied by a photographic portrait. The other 380 merely had a notice printed beside their names reading either “She has no picture” or “He has no picture” along with their name, age, occupation, and former address.

*Hanaa Malallah,* She/He Has No Picture, 2019–2020. Burnt canvas collage on canvas with laser-cut brass plaques. Variable dimensions. Installation in the Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023.
Photo by Eric Perez.

“It was dark, only dimly lit by the hole in the ceiling made by the missile … a toxic smell of smoke and charred bodies permeated the air—human remains had been fused into the very fabric of the interior by the intense heat of the explosions … the images were deeply etched in my mind and have haunted me over the years. Twenty-eight years after the shelter visit, I was suddenly ready to put the disaster into artwork.”

— Hanaa Malallah

I mimicked the way they were killed—incineration—by producing their portrait using fragments of thin, burnt canvas. Each portrait was built up layer upon layer in bas-relief. During that time, I felt as if I was working with clay or flesh—burning flesh.

There are twenty brass plates capable of mirroring the viewers’ faces. Sentences written in Arabic are engraved on each surface reading either “she has no image” or “he has no image.”

I used the name, gender, age, occupation, and former address of the victims from the booklet to produce distorted portraits by feeding the computer with their information. I also produced plain canvases with their names in number code. I then asked a computer programmer in Bahrain, when I was teaching there, to help feed the computer with the information of the 308 victims collected from the 1991 booklet—name, gender, age, occupation, former address, and their name in number code. We also fed the computer with some canvas portraits which I had created for the victims’ pictures.

Each canvas image had been chosen to closely match the given information of the victims with no pictures. What resulted were distorted, moving images, portraits without clear features.

Using my ruins technique, this project commemorates the shelter victims and my visit to the site.

*Hanaa Malallah,* She/He Has No Picture, 2019–2020. Closeup of brass plaques.
Image provided by the artist courtesy of MoMA and the New York Times (Walter Wlodarczyk).

SH: How does She/He Has No Picture speak back to or critique US wars, militarism, colonialism, and capitalism?

HM: The US is known as a country of contradictions. It is well known as the “land of freedom” and for its internal democracy; yet simultaneously it is well known not only for its history of militarism and colonialism but for causing the most wars and sanctions in modern history. I am speaking specifically about Iraq, and I experience those contradictions by being given a chance to show my work which condemns US crimes, in the US.

SH: How does exhibiting She/He Has No Picture in different locations change the meaning of the work?

HM: The exhibition location of this project does not change the meaning of it, but exhibiting this work in the US specifically adds a lot of irony—the US caused the wars and created our disaster and then subsequently welcomes our art about that disaster. The very country that bombed our shelter has twice given me the opportunity to show this work, once at MoMA PS1 and now in the Surviving the Long Wars exhibition. What is more is that this country provides the right for my voice to be heard. I do not know if this happened accidentally or if it is a strategic way to try and wash its hands from the crime by showing artwork of the victims. It looks to me like catharsis for both the victims and perpetrators, which is as important to western culture as it is for us.

“I do not believe in borders or ethnicity. War is war wherever it has happened and to whomever it has happened to. It is a crime.”

— Hanaa Malallah

SH: What do you think it means to exhibit the work in dialogue with works by other Iraqi, Afghan, Southwest Asian, and South Asian artists impacted by the “Global War on Terror” and Native American/Indigenous artists responding to US colonialism, and Black, Brown, and Indigenous US military veteran artists responding to the contradictions of American exceptionalism?

HM: I do not believe in borders or ethnicity. War is war wherever it has happened and to whomever it has happened to. It is a crime. Human violence would not be “beaten but by apocalypse,’’ as Susan Sontag has said.

Each war is followed by exodus, replacement, and resettlement, and all these often occur violently. I have tasted wars and replacement first hand; therefore, naturally, my work shows solidarity with all people affected by wars and violence, including Native American/Indigenous peoples who, I feel, live in exile and as refugees in their own country. I share with them the same horror. Therefore, I think the She/He Has No Picture project fits perfectly with—and is in dialogue with—the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Asia, and the Indigenous people of America, in the Surviving the Long Wars triennial. This exhibition gives us an opportunity to speak out about the colonialism and militarism of the United States.

Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. From left to right: Hanaa Malallah, She/He Has No Picture, 2019–2020; Michael Rakowitz, American Golem, 2022; Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation), Trail of Tears, 2005.

SH: What advice do you have for emerging artists, especially those impacted by war and other forms of structural and institutional violence?

HM: I believe artists can be the perfect messengers to tell what happened. And art can be a perfect medium to get people’s attention and give justice to the innocents by reporting what happens, either directly or indirectly in the future, so that it will not be forgotten. Artwork can also be a perfect visual archive for human history.

Hanaa Malallah is an artist, researcher and educator based in London. Born in Iraq, she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, and later earned an MA and PhD from the University of Baghdad. In her graduate work, she developed a semiotic approach to art, receiving a doctorate in 2005 for a thesis that uses forms of logic elaborated by modern philosophy to examine the art of ancient Mesopotamia. Malallah left Iraq at the end of 2006 for an artist residency at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris; that was followed by fellowships at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Chelsea College of Art in London. Before leaving Iraq, she taught at the Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Baghdad; in recent years she has taught at the Royal University for Women in Bahrain.

Since the early 1990s, Malallah has tried to think through destruction as an essential part of the human condition, by treating the material she works with as found objects that she mutilates or disfigures according to what she came to conceptualize in 2007 as a ‘ruins technique’. This reflection on destruction has drawn on Malallah’s research on semiotics, and on the material culture of ancient Mesopotamia, but more recently it has shifted its focus from objects to landscapes, and it has explored the ‘virtual’ aspects of destruction: the temporality of decay, the survival of material, and the paradoxical appearance of invisibility within the visible. Her research on the virtual has led her more recently to examine the relationship between spiritualism and technology.

Spencer Harrison completed his MA in English from the University of Illinois Chicago in 2023. During the 2022–2023 academic year he conducted this interview while in the Surviving the Long Wars seminar class in the Museum and Exhibition Studies program and Gender and Women’s Studies program at University of Illinois Chicago.

Shelter in the Storm: An Interview with Hanaa Malallah

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