Geopolitics and the Event: Rethinking Britain's Iraq War Through Art

Alan Ingram. Oxford, UK: Wiley, RGS Book Series, 2019. viii and 240 pp., figures, acknowledgments, references, index. $39.95 paper (ISBN 9781119426059), $94.95 cloth (ISBN 9781119426004).

Sixteen years after the enormous demonstrations that took place in cities across the world to protest going to war (15 February 2003), and three years after the 2016 publication of the Iraq War Inquiry (or Chilcot Inquiry) that established “military action at that time was not a last resort” (p. 188), Alan Ingram's book, Geopolitics and the Event, offers a thoughtful, sensitive, and refreshing meditation on the politics of Britain's Iraq War. Indeed, this book reminds us of how that war continues to shape current discourses, positions, and alignments in British politics. What is original about Ingram's approach is that he engages the Iraq War through the many thought-provoking and affecting works of art created in response to that event. I highlight three main contributions that the book makes and consider three examples of artworks presented in the book to discuss these points more fully.

First, the book forms a major contribution by helping scholars to think through the complex relationships between art and politics. In political geography as well as in critical approaches to international relations, many turn to the arts to consider questions of politics, power, difference, and justice. Ingram's book does more, however, than posit art as a tool or a route toward bringing about a better social world. Geopolitics and the Event presents a considered, sustained, and nuanced engagement with the question of the relationship between art and politics that critically questions straightforward presumptions about what art does.

In this vein, Ingram engages Rancière's (2019, 44) reading of art as not reducible to particular objects or practices. Drawing on the concepts of “communities of sense” and “structures of feeling,” he positions art as involving sensation and as a process of sense making. He also situates the arts as part of a dispositif; that is, emerging as part of a “heterogeneous ensemble.” This is a valuable insight because it allows scholars to understand art and aesthetics as a form of power, as associated with certain kinds of institutions and architectural forms, such as schools, hospitals, museums, and galleries, which, in turn, necessitates acknowledging the colonial histories of art, as well as the appropriation of art by Western museums and galleries. Ingram, however, is mostly interested in teasing out an understanding of art as involving disagreement: as a way of writing ourselves into the world when we cannot see ourselves in it, and therefore as a mode of expression that goes beyond a utilitarian or unifying end. As he writes, art “may bear the effects of intentions but has no single designer or strategist, its effects are emergent and provisional, and it may change significantly as a result of events” (p. 45).

This brings us to the second contribution of this book, which is to elaborate a particular approach to the question of the event. Ingram's approach builds on the work of Deleuze and notably, Bennett's (2012) Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11, by positing artworks as staging a “counter-actualisation” of an event, that is, a “process in which artworks can be understood as appropriating events and enacting them otherwise” (p. 6). The event of Britain's Iraq War is therefore understood as something that unfolds beyond the end of British combat operations, which was marked in a ceremony held on 30 April 2009 in Basra. On 7 September 2019, the number of civilian deaths resulting from this war stood at between 183,891 and 206,548.

Ingram demonstrates how addressing the Iraq War necessarily means addressing Britain's colonial histories in Iraq, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire through to the rise of Ba'athist rule and the regime of Saddam Hussein (1979–2003). It also means engaging the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), the Gulf War (1990–1991), the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions (1990–2003), and Saddam Hussein's repression of the Kurds as well as other groups in Iraqi society. He does this by engaging artworks (including exhibitions) as “evental assemblages” (p. 35); that is, as emerging from events, as events themselves, and also participating in further events (p. 35). The book therefore offers an enlightening approach in terms of thinking about how war persists and reemerges, and for conceptualizing the ways the arts can unsettle the dominant ways of making sense of the world around us (p. 19).

The third contribution is that the book offers a reading of the transversal geographies between Britain and Iraq. Although the focus on “Britain's Iraq War” is designed to acknowledge the author's positionality and the limits of his knowledge (e.g., he is open about the fact that this book does not include discussion of artworks in Iraq), the book nevertheless engages the ways artworks have traveled between Iraq and Britain, and in the process changed their forms, spatialities, and durations, drawing affective connections between here and there.

The three artworks that I have selected engage these three points and demonstrate the ways they overlap. The first is Rabab Ghazoul's (2009) work, Small Medium Large / Man Woman Child, discussed in the evocatively titled chapter, “Iraq beyond Iraq.” Born in Mosul, Iraq, Ghazoul has lived and worked in Cardiff since 1993. Through her art, she asks what “community,” “democracy,” and “belonging” might mean in different sites and spaces (http://rababghBazoul.com/). Small Medium Large plays on the popular “I ♥ New York” motto and logos on t-shirts, badges, and identity stickers, but invites a different encounter by using the names of different cities in Iraq; for example, I ♥ Fallujah, I ♥ Haditha, Ramadi, Amarah, Kirkuk. In this work, participants were invited to find out what they could about these cities, beyond their knowledge of them through war. Her point was to expose how these places have become “flattened, narrowed and militarised” (p. 96). The work was first displayed at a Welsh-language festival, the Eisteddfod, in 2009, and according to Ingram's interview with the artist, it was the prevalence of t-shirts, badges, and identity stickers at this festival (and beyond) that made her think about using the form. The work invites us to draw connections between here and elsewhere and also raises questions about knowledge and nonknowledge. For Ingram, the work voiced “a sense of the difficulty of learning anything much at all about Iraq or Iraqi people” (p. 98), despite all the talk about Iraq in the news. I felt there was also more to say, about the ways in which war gets branded, and how, following international relations scholar Lisle (2016), we might consider the entanglements between entertainment, war, tourism, and miltarism.

Another artistic work discussed in the book is Jeremy Deller's The Baghdad Car. This work is more well-known, perhaps owing to the high profile of the artist. With permission from the mayor of Baghdad, Deller managed to acquire the remains of a wrecked car that was destroyed in a bomb attack at the Al-Mutanabbi street book market on 5 March 2007, when thirty-eight people died. As part of another project called It is what it is, Deller pulled the wrecked car from Baghdad through various U.S. cities, parking it on the city's streets, and inviting people to discuss the war. This forms another example of art staging a transversal encounter. When the car was at the end of this journey placed in the atrium of the Imperial War Museum in London, Ingram describes how it became a unique object. At this point, the atrium, which formed the visitor's first encounter with the museum, held only weapons of war, and not many objects demonstrating destruction from war. This object therefore changed the atmosphere in this part of the museum by telling other stories.

Ingram highlights how this work therefore restaged the colonial archaeological practices of the museum. In introducing this object from Baghdad in a war museum in London, Deller revealed, “albeit ironically,” “the processes whereby museums participate in the aesthetic production of national identity as something that can be felt and touched” (p. 86). This work serves not only to show the connections between Britain and Iraq, but to argue that art can participate in and disrupt truth-making discourses, including those that “suffuse and structure the museum as institution” (p. 86).

Finally, I want to discuss Richard Wilson's installation, 20: 50, which involves a single room filled to waist level with oil. A pathway runs through the room, providing participants with a unique encounter with the smell, materiality, and dark color of oil. I selected this example because it reminded me that art does not necessarily say something original or new about politics, nor does it need to. Political theorists such as Connolly (2005) encouraged scholars to think about more than oil when trying to understand the causes of the 2003 Iraq War and why George W. Bush won a second term as U.S. president. Ingram, in his discussion of numerous interesting works selected for this chapter on “the geopolitical aesthetics of oil,” shows that there is much more to talk about in relation to oil. For example, he situates this work as potentially engaging the event of the Anthropocene, by questioning our reliance on oil more generally. He also considers how the work changed as it was transported and shown again in the city of Sulaymaniyah, in the region of Kurdistan, in 2009. This city is home to the Amna Suraka museum, the former red security prison, which was used to hold and torture Kurdish people, students, and dissidents of the regime of Saddam Hussein between 1979 and 1991. Shown in this context, the work took on new political resonances, specifically relating to the struggles of the Kurdish people. Overall, Ingram's attentiveness to the artworks themselves shows the value of refusing to approach the relationship between art and politics as linear or causal. For example, he argues that it was also possible to encounter this work as not about oil at all, but as a multisensory experience involving a reflective surface. As such, the work connects sensation and sense making, but not necessarily in a way that involves a specific political message.

This book encourages us as geographers to think further about what it is that we think we are engaging when we are drawn to analyze the arts. When addressing questions of politics, power, and war specifically, Ingram helps us consider how artworks can work to trouble our imaginative geographies of here and elsewhere. This matters because such imaginative geographies serve to uphold, structure, and legitimize war. Disrupting them can enable other conversations, as the works by Ghazoul, Deller, and Wilson show. Finally, this book reminds political geographers who might not address the Iraq War directly in their teaching or research of the enduring role this war plays in shaping and haunting contemporary international politics.