Iraqi dreams writ large

Estimates of the number of artists who have left Iraq since the US-British occupation began in 2003 vary from 50 per cent to 80 per cent.

Riding on Fire: Iraqi Art Under Occupation at the Artiques Gallery in London's Wandsworth exhibits paintings and sculptures by some 23 artists who have managed not only to stay in Iraq but to stay working. An astonishing feat.

While many of the exhibited painters' imaginations assume the brilliant colours of immediate memory - of pre-war, of childhood, of sunlight streaming through multicoloured glass in elegant arched windows - memories of Iraq's ancient riverine cultures, without which we probably wouldn't be putting two and two together, flow steadily through the paintings and sculptures as well. Much of the work is dated 2008. The longing for a better future is palpable.

Scarlet, yellow, blue and purple crowd Khadhim Nwir's canvas, Memory. A dove, shadowed by menacing black, drops her mauve tail feathers like tears onto figures which are all head, limbs skinny or non-existent, each of whose single Horus-like eye is turned in one direction - towards lush green thickets, the past.

Redha Farhan, along with fellow sculptor Najim Alqaysi, curated the show. His bronze al-Hallaj I is a strip of bronze, about one-centimetre thick by 20 long by six wide. It sits on its right-angled backside. Beneath its ring-hinged knees hang two bare feet, heavy with death. At its summit is an agonised head, face only, brain box scooped out, teetering on a broken neck.

Al-Hallaj is every Abu Ghraib that we know and don't yet know about. In reality, al-Hallaj was a 9th century mystic, whose independent and open-minded Islamic teachings got him into trouble with the authorities in Baghdad. He was hanged to death under conditions of great physical cruelty. Comparable to that of this century's occupation forces? Probably, given the peculiarly modern psychological cruelty that they throw in.

Abdul Qahhan's mixed-media work Sumerian Symbols I wonderfully mixes ancient script and modern image. A small cut-out of a woman's scarlet lips, partly scribbled over, is pasted onto but certainly doesn't obscure the Sumerian ideographs that themselves mix the hot green and scorchingly beautiful blue seeping in from opposite sides of the canvas.

The exhibition's preoccupation with script looks forwards as well as backwards.

An Iraqi tradition of creating images out of Arabic script emerges in various contemporary forms, from the wide-open graffiti slashes and swishes of Dhia Alkhozai's Childhood Memory 1 and 2 to the intensely integrated compositions of oil painter and ceramicist Thamir Khafaji. His ceramic Part Of Dhia al-Azzawi is a tribute to this leading Iraqi artist who now lives in London.

Simplistic Western ideas about Islam proscribing any art except representations of the words of the Koran take a bit of a knocking.

Working Arabic script into illustrative images is another Iraqi tradition, but modern Iraqi book art can be both abstract and representational in form and its themes as non-scriptural as modern poetry and current events.

It's worth noting that, under Saddam's regime, artists are said to have suffered little persecution, even though Western sanctions damaged the health of contemporary arts, flourishing since the 1960s.

An Iraqi artist living in Britain said recently that, in his country today, the militias are contemporary artists' greatest enemy. No modern artist, he said, can safely exhibit. Abstraction is a forbidden form and nudity a forbidden subject.

This is the war against art that the US and British administrations have unleashed on Iraq.

Exhibition shows until October 31 at Artiquea Gallery, 82 Wandsworth Bridge Road, London SW6 2TF. Phone: (020) 7731-2090 or visit www.artiquea.com for more information.