Because … there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad features a photograph that Jamelie Hassan took during her first visit to Baghdad, Iraq, in the late 1970s when she studied Arabic at the University of Mustansyria. The photo shows the iconic tiled dome and minaret of a Baghdad mosque, and the work’s text evokes Arabic literary traditions as exemplified in One Thousand and One Nights. Hassan conceived this project as a billboard in 1991 as a response to the Gulf War, a conflict between Iraq and a United Nations-sanctioned coalition of forces led by the United States. Within six months of the beginning of the war, hand-painted versions of Hassan’s billboard were exhibited in the city centres of Windsor and London, ON. In 1992, it was displayed in downtown Vancouver at the corner of Richards and Pender Streets. The work was exhibited on the exterior of the Belkin as a printed banner from 2005 to 2011, and has been presented in the past as a postcard and as a lightbox.

Because … there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad asks us to consider how a city is imagined and erased in regimes of representation, regimes that instruct us how to respond to those others with whom we are at war. It is a powerful incitement to use one’s imagination to resist such representations and to empower oneself. Hassan’s evocative combination of text and image retains currency in our contemporary world, speaking to the current context of politics, economics and international conflict we are seeing now.

Jamelie Hassan is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator and lecturer, for whom art and activism are deeply intertwined. Her experience living as a Canadian citizen with a Lebanese immigrant background and leading a career that has involved extensive international travel contextualizes the sensitivity to cultural displacement, political conflict and social activism in her work. Her art is both personal and political, addressing worldwide concerns about cultural interactions, the subjection of women, colonialism, racism and political conflict. Using traditional and contemporary cultural artifacts, she works in a visual language of cultural cross-references.

Image (above):  Jamelie Hassan, Because… there was and there wasn’t a city of Baghdad, 1991. Collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, purchased with support from the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program and Salah Bachir, 2005