In Prelude to the Round City, a site-specific installation featuring 3D scanned projections, scaffolding, and neon, the artist data-maps the lived and public spaces of Baghdad’s post-war metropolis and the ancient Mesopotamian Marshes of Southern Iraq near where she was born. Conceived in exile and produced over three trips to Iraq, the work shares a perspective of one’s alienation, a citizen-stranger who can never truly return.
Prelude to the Round City
Date: 2023
Multi-media installation: 5 channel LiDAR projections, neon, scaffolding, scrim, frame
23 min 40 sec
Artist/editor: Sama Alshaibi
Data Visualization Consultant: Devin Bayly
Data visualization: Sama Alshaibi, Devin Bayly, Karina Buzzi, Ben Kruse
LiDAR consultant: John Buchanan
Fixers and assistants in Iraq: Shawk Ayman and Abdulrahman Zeyad
Researchers and Assistants in USA: Wisam Alshaibi, David Baboila, Karina Buzzi, Mahmood Gladney and Zakiriya Gladney
Commissioned by Maraya Art Centre with additional support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Ouster Digital Lidar, School of Art and Arizona Arts at the University of Arizona
Standing between the circular projections of the LIDAR scans and further enveloped by scaffolding puncturing the physical structure, a luminous neon outline of a female figure glows. Scheherazade, the heroine orator, and central protagonist of the One Thousand and One Nights Tales, has long been rendered as the quintessential seductress by artists in manuscripts and paintings. Alshaibi’s neon, however, refers to an iconic public artwork standing on the banks of the Tigris River. Situated in Karrada Park in Baghdad, Scheherazade, a bronze sculpture made by the revered late Iraqi artist, Mohammed Ghani Hikmat in 1967, depicts a clever woman who doesn’t seduce the murderous King Shahryar with her body but creates an opportunity for survival by employing her intelligence and creativity.
The imagery of the city and marshes, which are disorienting and elusive, is made from millions of data points, each measuring the precise distance and orientation of the scanned surfaces to the LIDAR. Scanning at the speed of light, the technology sees the scene it examines with 3D vision, looking around all sides of material forms that the laser can reach. Mapping and rendering Baghdad beyond what the eyes normally see alludes to the complexities of visualizing a space between exile and return. It also captures a desire to share multiple stamps of time as it is understood in the overlapping layers of memory and how it is carried, reassembled, and re-made in the human psyche.
In Prelude to the Round City, Alshaibi appropriates the symbols and associations of Baghdad, including the formal outline of Hikmat’s sculpture. The highly sentient material of daily city life saturates the installation through dense spatial records, forming significant and banal assemblages of meanings. The scans illuminate the pursuit of everyday daily life filled with people moving across the urban terrain, the strain on the failing infrastructure with heavy traffic, making the outer margins of the city, such as simplicity expressed in the Mesopotamian Marshes and Milwiya Minaret, a utopic periphery.