Written by MYSA KAFIL-HUSSAIN

Born into an immensely artistic environment in 1971, Delair Shaker would grow to follow in his father’s footsteps in becoming a key player in Iraq’s creative world. Shaker’s father, Saad Shaker, a pioneering ceramicist, would surround his son with his work, encouraging a young Delair to spend his time in his ceramic studio in Baghdad.^[1]As a result, Shaker became captivated by the complexities and possibilities of clay. 

In the late 1980s, he enrolled in Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts to study ceramic art and graduated in 1990, the year Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The Gulf War and subsequent sanctions would make Iraq a tough place for Shaker to continue his promising career as an artist. Participating in many exhibitions, including the al-Wasiti Festival in 1992 (in which he won first prize), Shaker attempted to continue his work but in 1994 was offered a teaching position in Amman, Jordan, which his father encouraged him to accept. During his years in Jordan, he led a prestigious school’s art department, organized their annual art exhibitions, and personally began to experiment with mixed media, paintings and murals, moving beyond just ceramic art. In that time, he also set up his own experimental art studio in Amman.^[2]Shaker’s work took on new life and was changing continuously, drifting in and out of ceramics, incorporating collage and with a range of colors, shapes and textures. He began exhibiting his work in Jordan, but in 2005, his father passed away in Iraq. He subsequently decided to move to the United States of America, but not before paying Baghdad one last visit. 

He arrived to a city in flames, witnessing museums destroyed and his father’s public works in pieces (Shaker 2010: p.73).^[3]The instability following the 2003 invasion of Iraq had changed the face of Baghdad, and seeing his home in such pain had a profound effect on Shaker’s artwork. 

“In the following years, my compositions reflected Iraq as I saw it right before I left. I layered pieces of burnt, patterned cloth and mixed media materials…. I created my paintings as if watching the destruction of war through a telescope belonging to the destructor, a soldier peering through his rifle, while the paintings themselves documented the war on the receiving end, through shards of glass, sand, thin strips of metal, burnt materials, colour and clay.” Delair Shaker^[4]

Two artworks in the Dalloul Art Foundation Collection, which were created in 2008, after Shaker moved to Phoenix, Arizona, clearly show the shift into a darker period. With an intensely red background in Crossroads, the intersecting black lines and central details exude chaos. The bright red section in the center acts as a target or wound, an effect Shaker uses in much of his work in that period, and one which critic Suhail Sami Nader considers a representation of a broken heart at the center of the body.^[5]Bloody Hand, also painted in 2008, is a much bleaker insight into the physical impact of war, with the obscured hand emerging out of the darkness and into the light, but again with a central wound which leaves the struggling hand bloodied and fading away. Both Shattered Memories(2010) and Weeping Palms(2010), also in the collection, exude a distant sadness and a deep sense of loss – a “war emigreés narrative” as suggested by Aiste Parmasto.^[6]Beyond the chaos of war and suddenly faced with the reality of a destroyed country in both memory and physical environment (here being the intricate details of the palm tree), these paintings show charred and disregarded remains, left to wither away. 

Several further artworks in the collection – Home 1(2012), Home 2(2012), Bridge of Hope(2012), Reconstruction(2013) and Untitled(2016) – show experiments in texture and composition, but mainly we see Shaker exploring the world of constructivism. Fusing industrialism and spatial and geometrical concepts, Shaker attempts to rebuild home, incorporating what Parmasto sees as an interplay of fragility and impermanence.^[7]The range of textures, colours and materials show Shaker’s mind in full experimental mode, using nails, wood, fabric and much more to create a new world. However, Bridge of Hope seems to look closer to his new home (the US represented by what appears to be San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge) for a constructed vision into a hopeful future. One final artwork in the collection, Tahiya ila Abtal Gaza(2012), was perhaps painted after the Israeli bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip in late 2012, in which over 100 Palestinians were killed. Again using constructivist figures and a grid-like background, Shaker works against the assumed rigidity of constructivism and manifests an energetic, bloody scene in which he pays tribute to the strength of the champions of Gaza.

Throughout his youth in Baghdad and his later experiences of war, exile, loss, and renewal, Delair Shaker consistently reinvented his artwork, and continues to do so. His past and present compositions - informed by his experiences - hold heavy symbolic meanings, laced with memory, emotion and expressive imagination rooted in both tragedy and romanticism.^[8]Shaker still lives and works in Arizona but also works from Jordan, where he has recently set up the experimental Enki Ceramic Atelier alongside a range of prolific Arab artists. Through this collective project and his personal work, he continues to explore and innovate, whether with mixed media on board or canvas, or with ceramics, an art form, which has fascinated the artist since he was a child, watching his father, work in Baghdad.  

Notes

[1]Kosmos Journal (N.d), “Delair Shaker”, n.pag

[2]Delair Shaker (2010), “Time: Constant Change”, p. 72

[3]Shaker (2010), p.73

[4]Samar Faruqi (2011), “Art as a Psychological Outlet: Expatriation and the Work of Contemporary Iraqi Artists”, p.67-68

[5]Suhail Sami Nader (N.d), “Shadows of Places”, n.pag

[6]Aiste Parmasto (2012), “New Structures”, n.pag

[7]Ibid

[8]Ibid

Sources

Faruqi, Samar (2011). “Art as a Psychological Outlet: Expatriation and the Work of Contemporary Iraqi Artists”.In Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East VIII, pp. 62-73

Nader, Suhail Sami (n.d.). “Shadows of Places”, In Delairart.com. Accessed June 2020. https://www.delairart.com/item/34-shadows-of-places-suhail-sami-nader

Parmasto, Aiste (2012). “New Structures”, In Delairart.com. Accessed June 2020. https://www.delairart.com/item/27-new-structures-delair-shaker

Shaker, Delair (2010). “Time: Constant Change”, In Art in Iraq Today: Part III(Exhibition Catalogue, Meem Gallery, Dubai, 2011)

Kosmos Journal, (N.d.) “Delair Shaker”, In Kosmosjournal.org. Accessed June 2020. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/contributor/delair-shaker/