14/01/2026
Some highlights from Michael Rakowitz: Proxies for Poets and Palaces, now on view at Stavanger Art Museum, Norway.
📍 Stavanger Art Museum, Norway
🗓 27 September 2025 – 15 March 2026
Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz draws upon his Arab-Jewish heritage to scrutinize Western interventions in the Middle East. His works foreground the significance of cultural heritage in times of war and probe the ways in which societies negotiate the relative value of human life and cultural monuments.
At the centre of this exhibition are eight reliefs conceived specifically for Stavanger Art Museum, presented as a room within a room. These reliefs are reconstructions of sculptures that once adorned the walls of a chamber in the Assyrian Northwest Palace of Kalhu (near present-day Mosul). They form part of Rakowitz’s ongoing series The invisible enemy should not exist, originally initiated as a response to the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq. Rather than replicating the lost objects, the artist “reappears” them using discarded materials to evoke their absence. In this way, the artworks are “ghosts” of the originals—meant to haunt the viewer by serving as reminders of loss, rather than as replacements.
