Launch of 'A Bundle of Reeds: Contemporary Art after the Tigris'

Fifty years on, one of the original Tigris crew members, an Iraqi artist called Rashad Selim, has developed his own form of ‘expeditionary art’ in which Europe is no longer the main point of departure. Selim’s recent work, together with his collaborator Hannah Lewis, has taken one of the most elemental acts of making—the gathering and bundling of reeds—as a concrete metaphor for reviving the craft traditions of Iraq, devastated by numerous wars since the time of the Tigris.

This volume uses the coordinates of the Tigris expedition and Selim’s subsequent work along the rivers of Iraq as a matrix to explore changing conceptions of art, collectivity and technology. It brings together a wide range of artists and thinkers who are developing new frameworks for understanding the region traversed by the Tigris river, from Turkey and Iraq to the Arabian Sea. It also reflects on the global relevance of contemporary Iraq, a country which—as Selim has written—‘maps out the worst political, social, and environmental fears that threaten us and our planet.’