31 October 2026
Launch of 'A Bundle of Reeds: Contemporary Art after the Tigris'
3 December '26
Ibraas London
93 Mortimer Street
London
93 Mortimer Street
London
Rashad Selim, Hannah Lewis, and Simon Starling are joined by Rana Issa and Mike Sperlinger at Ibraas in London for a conversation which considers changing conceptions of art, collectivity, and technology in the wake of a famous 1970s experiment in maritime archaeology.
In 1977, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl organised the ‘Tigris’: a project which to build an ancient-style boat, constructed entirely from reeds, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Heyerdahl and a ten-man crew then sailed the vessel into the Gulf and the strait of Hormuz, to cross the Arabian Sea.
Fifty years on, as the region is wracked by conflict, Lewis, Selim, and Starling have made works which draw directly on the legacy of the ‘Tigris’. Selim, one of the expedition’s original crew members, has been developing the Ark Re-Imagined (2015-present) with Lewis: an extraordinary community-based art project which draws on the metaphor of the Mesopotamian ark to revive boatbuilding traditions in Iraq. Starling’s Houseboat for Ho (2023) - a public artwork made for a village on the west coast of Denmark - was the result of a cross-cultural collaboration between local Danish thatched roof builders and Aymara Indian reed boat builders from the same family who worked on the construction of the ‘Tigris’.
A Bundle of Reeds: Contemporary Art after the ‘Tigris’ is a new book which takes the expedition as the starting point for a complex exploration of the idea of cultural inheritance. The book 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.’
A Bundle of Reeds: Contemporary Art After the ‘Tigris’ is published by OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Archive Books. Copies will be available for a special launch price for this event.
Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 7.30pm.
Rana Issa
Rana Issa is a writer, translator, and curator. She is the author of The Modern Arabic Bible (2023), Tung Tids tale (Heavy Times Rant) (2026), which has been awarded the Thomas Hylland Eriksen Prize and was nominated for the Booksellers Prize, and the memoir Inn Ushtum Ushtum (If You Live, You Live) (2026). She is co-founder and artistic director of Masahat for Arab Arts and Culture in Exile, an award-winning institution that programmes and produces cultural expression by Arab and Global South artists and writers in Norway. Rana’s work has appeared in various journals, platforms, and presses, and she has collaborations with international artists from the region in the fields of film, performance arts, visual arts, and sculpture.
Hannah Lewis
Hannah Lewis is Programme Manager of Safina Projects (founded in 2017 with Rashad Selim), a creative practice that uses Iraq's endangered water heritage as a catalyst for cultural connectivity. Informed by studies in design methods and ecology, with an MA in Narrative Environments from Central Saint Martins, her previous experience includes curating a British Council exhibition on design and climate change seen by 250,000 people across China (2007), developing the UK’s first urban local currency, the Brixton Pound (2009), and establishing the Remakery, an experimental workshop for creative reuse (founded 2012). In 2021, she co-curated Ark Re-imagined, Iraq’s first national pavilion at the Biennale Architettura, Venice. Her writing has been published in Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times (2017) and the Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World (2021).
Rashad Selim
Rashad Selim is an artist whose forty-year career spans diverse forms of creative practice, including printmaking, sculpture, painting, illustration, curation, cultural research, grassroots development and project animation. His fascination with the history of culture and technology has driven decades of study and experiential research. His practice with Hannah Lewis, as Safina Projects, in expeditionary fieldwork and the reconstruction of ancient Mesopotamian boats builds upon his earlier experiences, including participating in Thor Heyerdahl’s Tigris expedition (1977–78). Rashad also brings a unique perspective as a surviving member of the renowned Selim family of artists, whose work was pivotal to the development of Iraqi culture in the 20th century.
Mike Sperlinger
Mike Sperlinger is a writer and curator based in Oslo. He is currently Professor of Writing and Theory at the Oslo Academy of Fine Art. Previous positions have included Head of Programme at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (2024–25) and Assistant Director of LUX, a London-based organisation for artists working with the moving image which he co-founded with Benjamin Cook (2001–13). Recent independent curatorial projects include The Social Life of Film (a congress of nomadic screening collectives in Copenhagen, 2023), and a series of exhibitions with the late German artist Marianne Wex. He is the editor of several publications including Afterthought: New Writing on Conceptual Art (2005) and Here Is Information. Mobilise–Selected writings by Ian White (2016).
Simon Starling
Simon Starling was born in Epsom, England, in 1967. He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 1992, and was professor of fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 2003 to 2013. His practice spans a wide variety of media, including film, installation and photography. Starling won the Turner Prize in 2005 and was shortlisted for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2004. He was a recipient of the Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl Nielsen Honorary Award in 2024. He has had solo exhibitions at an extensive list of galleries and museums, including most recently The Artist, Wearing a Mask of Adolph Menzel, Holds Plaster Casts of the Ambidextrous German Painter’s Left and Right Hands (and Other Interventions) at Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland.