Nada Shabout, Curator of All Manner of Experiments at the Hessel Museum of Art, Interviewed in Observer

Nada Shabout, who curated All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College’s (CCS Bard) Hessel Museum of Art, was interviewed about the exhibition in Observer. The show’s presentation of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, which was founded in 1951 and remained a creative force through the early 1970s, presents a spirited picture of multiple generations of artists working together to forge a new and distinct aesthetic that captured the dynamism and hope of postcolonial life in Iraq. In conversation with Farah Abdessamad, Shabout discusses the history of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, and how these artists and educators shaped Arab modernism as a global movement. “These artists tried to represent their new realities, their new country, their understanding of what it means to have a country with borders and a national identity,” Shabout says. “They were radical in the sense that they wanted major change. They rejected the sort of naturalism and old styles that were already dominant in Iraq. They were interested not only in representing themselves but also in connecting and contributing to the larger modernism of the world.”

Post Date: 08-13-2025