Michael Rakowitz2018

Interdisciplinary artist Michael Rakowitz utilizes architecture and public space, narrative and storytelling, sculpture, radio, video, performance and social intervention to create work that is, at once, personal, collective, and political. Committed to “suturing the wounds of war, and humanizing places by telling the stories that haven’t been told,” he describes the impulse driving all of his projects as “making visible the invisible,” as in his long-term project which, to this date, includes the recreation of more than 850 artifacts looted from the National Museum of Iraq. His inventive and useful procedures include the launch of a mobile food truck serving his mother’s Iraqi-Jewish cuisine, and the design of portable homeless shelters borne out of his investigation of Bedouin tents. His wide-ranging practice purposefully engages and impacts audiences well beyond the art world: from importer-exporters, and city planners, to soldiers.

 
“My works create a place where problem solving is also trouble making.”