“If humanity disappears what will be left? Art”. A conversation with Bilal Bahir

It’s been more than a month since I haven’t visited an exhibition due to the current lockdown due to the infamous COVID-19. So I said to myself that this was an opportunity to talk to artists directly. In the next weeks, I will publish some interviews with artists that I know personally or I’ve just e-met via Instagram, mostly.

The first conversation is with Bilal Bahir, an artist who lives and works in Belgium, originally from Iraq. His work is mainly made on paper and is strongly influenced by ancient Mesopotamia, literature, and socio-political issues everything immersed in a dreamlike sensation.

“Through his drawings, like a screenwriter, Bilal unfolds his reflection with the help of images of lived or dreamed events. On pages of ancient books, he unfolds his world, his dreams, and the harsh reality”.

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Your main medium is drawing. Can you tell me what is behind this choice? Is it only an aesthetic choice or is it inherent to your poetic?

Drawing came to me as evidence, after my studies of sculpture. As an artist you need
to feel your medium, it has to make you breathe and create. I discover the poetic relation between old pages who have their history and my imagery. Often, the stories I draw are related to the text on the page. I like to interlace two tales related to the past, together. The past is my source of inspiration, like the ancient drawings of the Abssy time in the 13th century, old fairy tales from East and West, and old mythologies.

The art market usually relegate works on paper to a lower price range compared to other media. Has this affected your practice? Do you use other media?

My experience in Europe is that there is always space in collections for drawings, more than paintings, who take large space. Some collectors of art buy what they feel true, and what they like, I don’t think that for them, the medium is important. Other collectors can be just interested to make an investment, and then the medium plays a role; they can buy a Jeff Koons. With my drawings, I reach a good place in the art market. Besides sculpture, I explored painting, installation and video art, but drawing stays my main medium. I don’t believe in the canvas as a medium with more value, I consider paper as a holy material, where I can draw up like in my childhood.

Your works have this dreamlike allure but at the same time, you deal with political, cultural, and economic issues. How do you manage to combine these topics with this specific aesthetic?

In my consciousness, there is a founder who melts these issues into the artwork. The unconscious prepare all these subjects by raising them together to a concept. The specific aesthetic comes from influences of the ancient culture of Mesopotamia and the early Islamic art and also from medieval art that I studied at the art school. The discovery of the paintings of Francis Bacon and the surrealist world of Magritte has left a deep mark on my artistic development. My art has part of truth based on dreams. The child inside me is the giant genie who drives me to find Utopia.

After the Flood, 2018

Iraq has extraordinarily strong but dichotomic imagery (for Western people at least): the cradle of civilization or never-ending war zone and I think your drawings might help fill in that gap. As a creator of images, how do you cope with such a heavy visual inheritance?

Irak let me a heavy legacy that feels similar to the stone of Sysiphe. The experience of the life of each artist reflects on the visible and invisible way. My roots are important and balancing between three dimensions: the heritage of Mesopotamia, my childhood, and war. This imagery finds his place through all my drawings.

Interpol Database, missing report, 2017

In your work, Interpol Database, we find a series of archaeological artifacts for which the title suggests something else; were they stolen, destroyed or…? Tell me more about this work.

This work is specific research, based on reality. The drawings represent sculptures who were stolen from the National Museum of Baghdad who was destroyed in the war of 2003. Some of these artifacts are still missing. As an artist, I find my responsibility to show these missing sculptures and to try to help to find them back to bring them to the National Museum. The representation I made for them is like identity pictures. This series was shown in the Museum of Art and History at the Cinquantenaire (in Brussels) and in the International Museum of Mask and Carnaval in Binche.

The Fruit of Exile, 2019

Based on the titles of your drawings I could catch a couple of literary references. What is your relationship and how much is it literature important in your work?

When I lived in Baghdad, as a teenager I read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Waiting for Godot by Beckett, and No one writes to the colonel by Marquez, and that is how I discover western literature. These books helped me to reset my place in a society of struggle. I believe that returning to the experience of the past helps to understand the present and helps to think about the future. Not only literature inspires my work but also ancient mythology and philosophy. I’m preparing a new work related to The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. All these elements of my inspiration create an algorithm to build the perfect artwork.

Did you manage to open the exhibition Couple d’Artistes in The Hague, I guess it was right at the beginning of the shut down due to the COVID-19 crisis? Tell me a bit about the preparation of this exhibition in which you were working with another artist, Anneke Lauwaert.

After my return from the USA, the shut down started so I could not reach Den Haag. This show started in Ghent, at De Buck Art Gallery at the end of last year. With Anneke Lauwaert we prepare a show in October in Linkebeek at Hors Tempsia Art Space.

Breathing, 2018

How has your artistic practice been affected by the pandemic situation?

The shut down reminds me of more dangerous shutdowns that I lived, without electricity and the internet, in Baghdad, the surrealist city, during the “hot war”. What we live in today is a cold war. The pandemic doesn’t impact me, I am working in my studio every day and drink a glass of wine, nothing has changed, except the cancellation of exhibitions and the possibility for art lovers to acquire my work. If humanity disappears what will be left? Art. As the ancient civilizations left us marvelous treasures of their culture.

I would like to end this interview with a soufist sentence of Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there