All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group marks the first major U.S. institutional effort to trace the impact of one of Iraq’s most influential artistic movements. On view at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, the exhibition brings together over seventy years of modern and contemporary Iraqi art, highlighting the diaspora’s role in preserving and reinterpreting the Group’s legacy.
Formed in 1951, the Baghdad Modern Art Group centred around “istilham al-turath”, i.e. drawing from heritage through new, experimental forms. While rooted in Iraq’s postcolonial optimism, the Group’s aesthetic language travelled far beyond Baghdad. Many of its members, and later generations of Iraqi artists, continued their practices abroad following years of upheaval, war, and displacement.
Curated by Nada Shabout, Tiffany Floyd, and Lauren Cornell, the exhibition foregrounds these transnational trajectories. Artists such as Dia al-Azzawi, Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Hanaa Malallah, Mahmoud Obaidi, and Walid Siti exemplify how the Group’s influence endures in the diaspora, as artists rework themes of memory, loss, and identity across media. Their works span cities such as London, Amman, Doha, and Toronto, offering an expanded view of Iraqi modernism that is at once fractured and deeply connected.
Drawing from major regional collections including the Barjeel and Dalloul Foundations, the exhibition places archival material alongside painting, sculpture, and drawing to narrate an evolving story of artistic inheritance. Importantly, it addresses how the Baghdad Group’s ideals, once envisioned within a modernising Iraq, now echo across global contexts.
As Iraqi artists continue to navigate exile, erasure, and resurgence, All Manner of Experiments provides a crucial lens through which to consider how collective artistic memory can survive, adapt, and remain urgent, even far from home.