Michael Rakowitz immediately conjured the image of a sacred book when he saw Prizren’s Jewish Cultural Center covered by a tarp (for renovation) with a split down the middle. In particular, he thought of an Iraqi Jewish prayer book, printed before the Farhud, the violent dispossession of Iraqi Jews in 1941, which led to his family’s exile in the United States. Rakowitz uses the Iraqi Jewish prayer books that he’s collected over many years as a springboard for the installation, and as a material to denounce attempts to politically contest his own, and many other, transnational identities through culture. In Rakowitz’s artistic universe, the reappearance of destroyed objects in connection with destroyed life often occurs. Anchored in his family’s history of displacement, his work engages with subjects ranging from the nationalist winds in the eastern Mediterranean to the recent intensification of imperialist violence in Iraq. The artist interrogates the biographies of objects implicated in these complex and conflicting histories to envision points of interaction and continuity upon which to imagine peaceful coexistence among people beyond nationalist and sectarian polarizations. His work, which takes the form of a tarp-covered facade, transforms the building into an open sacred book. On one of the spreads, the artist identifies the Arabic word Allah written in Hebrew letters. The pages covering the Jewish Cultural Center, which abuts other sacred spaces, such as the mosque, the Catholic cathedral, and the Orthodox church, remind us of the importance of the preservation of syncretic forms of life for the world not to be torn apart.

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