Michael Rakowitz

USA/IRAQ, 1973

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Michael Rakowitz first came to the attention of the art world in the winter of 1998, when a project called paraSITE began appearing on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Boston. It was a series of inflatable plastic homeless shelters, each one tailored to the individual specifications of its occupant—some had multiple windows, others a series of pockets for organizing belongings. One homeless couple, Artie and Myra, had Rakowitz produce a model with two connected rooms. What all paraSITE shelters shared was an essential architecture: They were designed to inflate by latching on to heat-exhaust ducts on the sides of buildings, swiping the escaping hot air and rerouting it to provide warmth for those living on the streets.

Born and raised in New York, Rakowitz has recently turned his attention to the country of his mother’s family: Iraq. In a series of projects over the last three years, Rakowitz has reshaped our conception of Iraqi culture and of the damage that the war has wrought. In Return (2006), he revived the import-export business of his late grandfather Nissim Isaac David, an Iraqi Jewish refugee, as a multipart public project. Opening a storefront on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, Rakowitz offered his customers free shipping to Iraq and imported Iraqi dates for sale in the United States. The store was highly stylized, exactly replicating the logos and stationery of his grandfather, but with Rakowitz, the sole proprietor, engaging anyone who walked in off the street about the global issues of the day. The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2007) was a gallery installation at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York. In it, Rakowitz faithfully replicated the objects known to be missing or looted from

the Iraqi National Museum during the initial U.S. invasion, but he reproduced them in the cheap paper packaging of Middle Eastern import foods, or community newspapers, along with comiclike drawings explaining the history of Iraqi archaeology.

Rakowitz’s work is informed by an idiosyncratic blend of performance, sculpture and graphic design; its activism is filtered through a highly aesthetic artifice. His projects, which weave together historical information and politics, are marked by a profound emotional depth.

Benjamin Tiven

Extract from “Art Matters,” published in The Nation on September 19, 2007