Online Program with Artist Michael Rakowitz

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art will host a special online screening of the film The Ballad of Special Ops Cody, followed by a conversation with the artist Michael Rakowitz on Tuesday, December 8, 2020 at 5:30 p.m. The 2017 stop-motion film follows the post-war story of an action-figure, infamously employed by Iraqi insurgents in a 2005 “hostage” incident. The video was filmed at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, which houses one of the largest collections of Ancient Near Eastern art in the United States. As Special Ops Cody wanders the halls of the institution, ancient statues from Iraq remind the fictional figurine of friends and foes encountered in Iraq, prompting a rescue mission to liberate the artifacts. Experiencing flashbacks and questioning both ancient history and recent events, Special Ops Cody, voiced by an Iraq War veteran, meditates on the experience of war and the real human and cultural costs of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

Following the screening, we will be joined for a conversation and Q&A with the artist Michael Rakowitz, an American artist of Iraqi Jewish descent whose conceptual projects, sculptures, and public art installations prompt us to think critically about issues of cultural heritage and connections between past and present in the Middle East. Rakowitz’s work has been featured in major exhibitions at MoMA and MoMA PS1, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Palais de Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and Whitechapel Gallery in London, among others. From 2018–2020, Rakowitz’s sculpture of an Assyrian Lamassu occupied the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, and in 2020, Rakowitz received the Nasher Prize for excellence in contemporary sculpture.

In 2007, Rakowitz began an ongoing project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist in response to the looting of around 15,000 artworks from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad that took place in the wake of the American invasion of 2003. While some looted artifacts have since been recovered, many thousands are still missing, and the work of Invisible Enemy continues today. In 2016, Michael added a new phase to The Invisible Enemy project, May the Obdurate Foe Not Stay in Good Health which focuses on cultural heritage looted or at risk in the ongoing civil war in Syria. Works from The Invisible Enemy project are featured in the exhibition Assyria to America at the Museum.

The conversation following the screening will be moderated by Sean P. Burrus, Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral curatorial fellow and co-curator of Assyria to America at the BCMA, and Sarah Graff, associate curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since 2018, Burrus and Graff have led the NW x NE project, a digital collaboration project involving over a dozen institutions born out of the desire to connect and transform our understanding of the relief panels and fragments from the Northwest Palace in the Assyrian capital at Nimrud in Iraq that make up the foundation of the ancient collections in nearly two dozen museums across the northeastern United States. By reconnecting and restoring the reliefs through digital approaches, and documenting their provenance stories, the NW x NE project seeks to engage with scholarly and public audiences over the present state of the reliefs, including conversations about the ethical responsibilities of institutions toward the objects and data under our stewardship.

This event is part of an ongoing series at the Museum of Art dedicated to the ancient and modern histories of the Assyrian reliefs from Nimrud and their reception. Recent public events have included conversations with historians, curators, and conservators and cultural heritage specialists who specialize in Assyrian history and culture. Stay tuned for more events this spring!

This is an online event. Please register here.

Sean P. Burrus
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow
Bowdoin College Museum of Art