Fragments of a culture

SAVING scraps of Baghdad’s books has given an artist hope.

Iraqi artist Qasim Sabti by Amar Murdan

AMID  the horror of suicide bombings and Iraq’s civil war, ­artist Qasim Sabti has built for himself an island of tranquillity.

In the garden of his art gallery in Baghdad, art students come to drink coffee and discuss matters other than the horrors besetting their country. The Hewar gallery — the Arabic word for dialogue — is one of the few places where conversation can be about something other than the conflict.

But to get to tranquillity is quite a challenge: the gallery is near the Turkish embassy and ­security around any embassy in Baghdad is heavy.

We drive past several military checkpoints and army tanks. Once soldiers check our identities, they open the boom gate at the end of the street.

It’s worth the effort: once we are inside the fascinating world of Qasim Sabti, one of Iraq’s leading artists, opens up.

On the walls are scores of paintings and in a storeroom he has hundreds of others.

Business is terrible — tourism has collapsed again with the new conflict and he rarely sells a painting. “Things are not easy,” he tells The Australian.

A painter and writer, his art was changed forever after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 when, he says, Baghdad became lawless.

Sabti was on his balcony when he noticed looters lighting fires — he rushed into the street to find his “beloved” Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a teacher, ablaze. Many of the academy’s 6000 art books were burning, with pages from some blowing down the street. Sabti began trying to retrieve what he could.

“I felt like a fireman desperately in need of finding survivors,” he wrote later in a booklet given to visitors to his gallery.

He found the cover of a Russian book that was popular with his students — it had lost all its pages, but the cover had survived.

“I was haunted by the little ­details of life that filled the inside cover: strips of cotton, some ­Arabic verses scribbled in pencil, notes written by the librarian,” he wrote.

“My imagination was reborn. Here I found the essence of life deeply inscribed as signs of one book’s extensive journey — I was filled with a new sense of life and hope.”

That new sense of life changed Sabti’s artistic direction. He set about incorporating rescued pages — or covers — into his work. Probably reflecting someone who has lived in a country traumatised by war, it became a positive way out of a dark period.

“Once a book is written, it lives forever,” he says as we sit t in his gallery recently. “I love books and I consider books are like people killed in a war. I give books a chance to stay alive. Fire was not enough to kill these books.

“I wanted to make something positive out of something bad so I try to express the whole book in one page or cover in a painting.”

Life for artists in Iraq is not easy, says Sabti. Apart from the wars and chaos, art is not given a priority by the government. Under Saddam Hussein, he says, funding for much art dried up — except, of course, for official portraits of Saddam.

Since, he says, most members of the government who decide arts funding understand neither art nor Baghdad’s culture. “They’re more interested in giving money to religious activities.”

Iraq, before Saddam, had a rich history of arts. There is a saying in the Arab world that books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut and read in Baghdad.

Lack of government funding and continuous conflict makes life difficult for artists — with tourism virtually dead, there is ­little market for Iraq’s art.

Sabti, who has lived through the Saddam era, the US occupation and the sectarian wars ­between Sunnis and Shi’ites, sees few reasons for optimism.

“I think what is going on now will break Iraq into three countries: Kurds, Sunnis and Shia,” he says. “If that happens, we will be so weak, we will become like ­Somalia.”