Michael Rakowitz perfoming Minaret, 2001-ongoing
Concerned with history and current events, Michael Rakowitz uses his work to explore pressing issues and to invite others into the conversations fostered by his public projects, installations, and events. He engages in fact-finding and makes connections with people at all opportunities, focusing on individuals involved in situations that range from the personal to the local to the geopolitical. Among his first projects is paraSITE (begun 1997), a series of inflatable homes built in consultation with the homeless people who would occupy them. Rakowitz’s own Iraqi-Jewish heritage figures prominently in many of his works, reflecting his deep connection to the country. Since 2004, with his ongoing project, RETURN, he has been attempting to import Iraqi dates into the U.S., the centerpiece of a multipart project that illustrates the cultural richness of this country in crisis.
Food truck of Enemy Kitchen, 2003- ongoing
Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973, New York) is the recipient of the 2020 Nasher Prize, the 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (Visual Arts category), a 2012 Tiffany Foundation Award; a 2008 Creative Capital Grant; a Sharjah Biennial Jury Award; a 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Architecture and Environmental Structures; the 2003 Dena Foundation Award, and the 2002 Design 21 Grand Prix from UNESCO. He was awarded the Fourth Plinth commission (2018-2020) in London’s Trafalgar Square. From 2019 - 2020, a survey of Rakowitz’s work traveled from Whitechapel Gallery in London, to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Torino, to the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, marking his first major museum retrospective in the region. He has shown regularly at Sharjah Art Foundation including mostly recently in Sharjah Biennial (2019 and 2023) and Unsettled Objects (2021) at the Flying Saucer.
Rakowitz’s work has appeared in various museums and biennials including: The Life of Things, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria (forthcoming); Choosing to Portage, Tephra ICA, Reston, VA (2023); In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination Rises, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE (2023); Surviving the Long Wars, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (2023); Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present (2023), Sharjah, UAE (forthcoming); In the Heart of Another Country: The Diasporic Imagination in the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2022); Air, Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City, Utah (2022), Mardin Biennial, Mardin, Turkey (2022); Beyond Codex: Living Archives, Center for Book Arts, New York, NY (2022); ARS22, Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland (2022); Visual Nature: The Politics and Culture of Environmentalism in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon, Portugal (2022); Portals, NEON, Athens, Greece (2021); Les Flammes, Musée d’Art moderne de Paris, France (2021); A Boundless Drop to A Boundless Ocean, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL (2021); Our world is burning, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2020); Assyria to America, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME (2019); and I Am Ashurbanipal King Of The World, King Of Assyria, The British Museum, London (2019) among others.
His works are featured in major private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Van Abbemuseum, Endhoven, Netherlands; The British Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Kabul National Museum, Afghanistan; UNESCO, Paris; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; Art Jameel Collection, Dubai, UAE and Tate, London, UK.
He lives and works in Chicago.
A living installation at the Baltic Centre in Gateshead uses horticulture to send a political message while also offering solace.
The Iraqi-American’s intricately-labelled planters and models form a repository for stories on everything from the destruction of Palestinian olives to homesick migrants.
Michael Rakowitz uses everyday objects to render lost artifacts into ghostly new forms.
The Iraqi-American artist brings his 'The invisible enemy should not exist' exhibition to Green Art Gallery.
In Réapparitions, on view from February 25 to June 12, 2022 at FRAC in France, Michael Rakowitz recreates or “re-appears” the missing and destroyed artifacts taken from the National Museum of Iraq after the American invasion in the early 2000s.
Michael Rakowitz's artwork on the cover of Mizna 22.2: The Experimental Issue.
An in-depth podcast conversation on the artist's big influences, from T.S. Eliot to Leonard Cohen.
Daniel Trilling writes about Michael Rakowitz's latest work for England’s Creative Coast.
The Iraqi-American artist connects the Kent coast to Basra in an inspired condemnation of war.
The Iraqi-American’s Margate commission is a monument to the folly of the Iraq conflict — and of monuments themselves.
ARTnews live with artist and professor Michael Rakowitz.
Rakowitz has installed at the Wellin a partial reconstruction of “Room H” within the Northwest Palace of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.
STIR investigates the multifaceted art-activism of Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who is showcasing his first solo exhibition at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai.
Assyria. Babylonia. Persia. These ancient empires covered an area generally consisting of modern-day Iraq and Iran. Museum goers can learn more about these cultures through exhibitions of their artistic expressions across North America.
Through playful, outraged interventions, a sculptor seeks to reclaim a lost Iraq.
Micheal Rakowitz’s thought-provoking work straddles the realms of contemporary art, politics and society.
The exhibition Michael Rakowitz. Imperfect Binding presents major artworks envisioned in the artist’s over-twenty-year practice traversing architecture, archaeology, ritual cooking practices and geopolitics.
Los Angeles’s city-funded triennial, Current:LA Food, has been hosting community meals that are open to the public throughout the city, though the events are still dominated by art world figures.
Conversation between Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz and Jonathan Rinck.
Rakowitz is the fifth winner of the coveted award, and will take home $100,000 to work on future projects.
Throughout his career, Rakowitz has been making artful reconstructions of lost heritage.
An Interview with Michael Rakowitz by Marisa Mazria Katz.
Michael Rakowitz’s work makes the invisible visible – whether it’s the victims of war or those made homeless by the economic downturn.
The artist behind London’s current fourth plinth sculpture has published a cookbook for date syrup.
The Beatles play a presidential funeral while Nimrud’s Palace is rebuilt with sardine cans in this angry, thought-provoking journey though time.
What counts as a cultural artifact? Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz turns the concept inside-out.
A review of Michael Rakowitz's exhibition at REDCAT, Los Angeles.
Enemy Kitchen makes Iraqi culture visible in the US beyond war, producing an alternative discourse and social space.
The latest fourth plinth commission is a full-scale recreation of a winged bull sculpture from 700 BCE entirely clad in Iraqi date cans.
With his fourth plinth commission unveiled in London, the artist talks archaeological magic tricks and Saddam Hussein’s obsession with Star Wars.
A reconstruction of an ancient statue of a winged bull destroyed by ISIS is the latest public art installation to sit on a sculpture platform here known as the Fourth Plinth, on Trafalgar Square.
Michael Rakowitz used 10,000 tin cans to rescue a treasure destroyed by Isis. The Iraqi-American, who once made a work out of Saddam Hussein’s dinner plates, explains why he likes causing trouble.
Food plays an interesting role in Rakowitz’s work, existing as a symbol for hospitality, while also carrying an intricate history of trade, travel and economic motives.
From war loot to Saddam Hussein's Star Wars obsession, an exhibition at MCA Chicago considers the costs of power and destruction.
A review of Michael Rakowitz's exhibition, Backstroke of the West, by Jordan Martins.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reviews Michael Rakowitz's show at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Whether through food, baseball memorabilia, looted Iraqi artefacts or Star Wars, Michael Rakowitz reappropriates and probes to raise questions about ancient history, popular culture and personal identity. Sarah Hassan speaks to the Iraqi-American artist about the bittersweet paradox of displacement and belonging.
Michael Rakowitz speaks about his work for the Istanbul Biennial.
