Written by Liam Sibai

Mahmoud Obaidi was born in Baghdad in 1966. His father was a military general, and his mother, a writer who, in the artist’s early years, surrounded him with art and culture. At his mother’s encouragement, the young Obaidi began his creative endeavors at the age of twelve. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from the University of Fine Arts in Baghdad and mounting his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in the same city, the artist left Iraq to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Guelph in Canada. He left Iraq voluntarily and intended to stay abroad for two years; unfortunately, the rest of his stay in North America was a forced exile brought on by the political conditions of his nation. After earning his master’s, he received two diplomas in Film and New Media, one from Ryerson University in Toronto and another from the HIF Film Academy in Los Angeles.

At a young age, Obaidi immersed himself in poetry, especially the works of Badr Shaker El Sayab and Abd el Wahab el Bayyati. However, as the dawn of the 1980s brought conflict with Iran, Obaidi had to settle for reading his father’s military literature due to the sanctions and travel restrictions imposed on Iraq. By the time Obaidi held his first solo exhibition in 1990, Iraq had long been under these conditions, and the work in this show was therefore distanced from the influence of most art produced and circulating outside Iraq. During this period, Iraqi artists were split into two groups – those producing work in their homeland and those abroad – whose contact was limited by the political climate. After this first show, Mahmoud Obaidi joined the latter group, creating all of his subsequent work outside of Iraq. 

Mahmoud Obaidi’s works explore themes of war, displacement, and loss of identity; they are recreations of particular moments, objects and notions from contemporary Iraqi history and are intended to highlight certain aspects of the nature of those objects and moments. In 2016, for example, Obaidi displayed a fallen bronze statue of Saddam Hussein in an untitled work, suggesting that the excessively mediatized moment of the fall of this statue is in itself a monument to the victory of American “democracy” in Iraq. Fair Skies(2010-2013), which grew out of the project How Not to Look Like a Terrorist inThe Eyes of an American Airport Authority(2010), approaches racial profiling through the lens of often commodified sets of cultural signifiers. The tongue-in-cheek exhibition suggests using cosmetics as a means of avoiding an encounter with airport security in the United States. Vending machines branded with the name of the artist’s fictional company, Fair Skies, marketed products meant to obscure physical features associated with Arabness and/or create those associated with Western European ancestry, such as blue contact lenses and hair bleach. The exhibition also included a staging of a confrontation with airport security mediated by several action figures in several installations and a video. Mission Accomplished(2013) commemorates the tenth anniversary of George W. Bush’s eponymous speech on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, in which the then-president of the United States announced the end of major combat in Iraq. The neon in the work spells ‘MISS10N ACCOMPLISHED’ in geometry and coloration similar to that of the American flag. Obaidi visits and revisits the throwing of two pairs of shoes at George W. by the journalist Muntadhar Al-Zaidi, producing a portrait of Bush surrounded by shoes in Farewell Kiss(2012), then reproducing that work in bronze for his Fragmentsexhibition with Farewell Kiss 4(2016), and even embroidering Bush’s face in to a canvas using shoes laces in Shoelace Bush (2016).

The artist and his family currently reside in Toronto. However, Obaidi frequently visits Doha and Beirut for work.

Sources

"About." About OBAIDI - : : O B A I D I A R T : :. Accessed June 27, 2019. https://www.obaidiart.com/About-OBAIDI.

"Mahmoud Obaidi Biography." Meem Gallery. Accessed June 27, 2019. https://www.meemartgallery.com... 

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. "About Obaidi." In Obaidi In Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist. Qatar Museums.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich, and Mahmoud Obaidi. "In Conversation." In Obaidi in Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Shabout, Nada. “Bifurcation of Iraq’s Visual Culture.” In We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War, 5-23