Artists

Rheim Alkadhi

Press release

Templates for Liberation is the UK’s first exhibition of artist Rheim Alkadhi. Addressing ongoing consequences of war and colonialism in present-day Iraq and the region at large, this exhibition presents sculptures, archival documentation, and emancipatory counter-histories. The ICA’s main gallery will feature a series of sculptures fabricated from the heavy-duty transport tarpaulins of cross-border industrial vehicles. These sculptures bear the traces of their transnational passage; the material itself embodies the environmental and sociopolitical violence consuming the region. The adjacent reading room offers archival and speculative reference points for thinking about Iraq’s colonial borders, resource extraction, and the ensuing practices of biometric categorisation that would exploit ethnic differences for decades to come. Alkadhi conceives of this exhibition as a material template for a set of liberatory encounters: to re-imagine global space—and our agency in our short-term inhabiting of it—proposing ways of refusing the violence and injustice that characterise our times.