Rawan Almukhtar

When US troops confiscated Rawan Almukhtar’s camera in Baghdad, he switched to drawing on tracing paper. In the series The Witnessing Archive, the artist depicts sites shaped by the twelve-year US occupation of Iraq. Military raids, arrests, and firefights left enduring spatial traces that were often concealed or forgotten and very seldom documented. All one sees is the new normal: checkpoints, sniper posts, barbed wire, and blast walls.

Produced in the absence of photographic evidence, the drawings also become a form of self-protection, a way to return to oneself in the midst of an ongoing catastrophe. Installed on the oriel windows at Griesplatz 34, the works look out onto Graz’s most diverse neighborhood, which the ultraright likes to denigrate as a no-go area.

Rawan Almukhtar (1991, Baghdad, Iraq) is an artist working primarily with drawing and painting. His work is deeply influenced by his background as a political activist and often revolves around themes of migration, identity, and state violence, reflecting on his own experiences and broader societal issues. It has been shown at Kunsthalle Wien, Queer Museum Vienna, and Belvedere 21, Vienna, among others. Almukhtar was nominated for the Belvedere Art Award in 2022 and 2024, shortlisted for the Exile Visual Arts Award in 2023, and received the Kunsthalle Wien Preis in 2024. He lives in Vienna.