It’s more than a year since Michael Rakowitz’s lamassu landed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. An ancient winged bull with a human head and an armour made from date syrup cans, it’s a monument to lost heritage and people in Iraq.
With this show, we can explore this great work’s creator in depth. Underpinning Rakowitz’s art is deep yet unorthodox research. In one absorbing multimedia work here, the Beatles’ 1970 break-up is explored in the concurrent context of Pan-Arabism. Writing and drawing in Rakowitz’s own hand appears throughout the show, emphasising his subjectivity and luring us into his thinking. It never feels indulgent because Rakowitz always finds ways to link social or political issues with visceral human experience, to root his work in place, culture and community.
Throughout are exquisite visual manifestations of his research. Rubbings and plaster casts capture the art nouveau decorations of Armenians in Turkey before the Armenian Genocide; medieval books from a German library that came under threat from Nazi burnings and British bombings are reconstructed in stone from the site of the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. Then, there’s the broader project that gave us the plinth.
The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist reconstructs in food packaging and vernacular newspapers artefacts looted from a Baghdad museum or destroyed by Islamic State. So much here is a poignant evocation of the precariousness of cultures. Yet there’s abundant poetry, too: Rakowitz underscores our ultimate common humanity.
Until August 25 (020 7522 7888, whitechapelgallery.org)
