Tamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer whose work is concerned with the historic and contemporary representation of her own culture, in its diversity. She has published and exhibited work across the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Her photography and commentary focus on the dispossessed and marginalized, the underside of Orientalist representations, the underground of settler societies, the underworld of war. She has photographed African asylum seekers in south Tel Aviv, the denizens of cemeteries in Cairo, the crumpled remains of weapons in Kurdistan, undocumented workers in Montreal, and barbershops in Gaza. She is a widely sought after commenter on the ethics of photography, gender and masculinity, and the changing social and environmental landscapes of the Middle East. Her fellowship research project is titled Reimagining Return to the Marshes. Tamara is our 2024-25 Artist in Residence.
What are your main research interests and what excites you most about them?
I am an interdisciplinary artist, working primarily with the medium of photography. My research offers a decolonial feminist view of the Arab world and diasporic migrant communities. My art practice investigates the close relationship between photography and colonialism found in ongoing mechanisms of epistemic violence in the visual representation of people from South West Asia and North Africa. I engage photography, video and printed matter to tell stories about land, labour, and human connection.
What project are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it?
I’m currently working on my book project, Re-imagining Return to the Marshes, which explores the intimate relationship between visual ethnography and colonial power, by way of the marshlands of southern Iraq. In this work I ask: Can histories be colonized, even in the imagination? In 1977, the British duo of Gavin Young and Nik Wheeler published a photography book entitled Return to the Marshes. Young and Wheeler’s evocative collection of images subsequently became central to the historic representation of the marshes and their people. Yet the collection’s gaze is inescapably colonial in aesthetic and discursive terms. My book revisits and critically re-interprets this collection to cultivate a decolonial visuality and indigenous imagination. I combine my own photographs taken during four visits to the marshes with archival images I crowdsourced from Iraqis living inside and outside the country, including those currently living in the marshlands. My decolonial method involves creating a living Iraqi archive, and overlaying images from this archive onto those from Young and Wheeler. My resultant project tells a complex story that is not fixed in time; the marshes are today drying up because of war and climate change. I weave competing memories and visions through the history of the marshes as implicated in a political and environmental history of Iraq.
How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far?
The fellowship so far has been rich in conversations and connections. It is a privilege to have the space and time to work on a project and listen to others working through theirs.
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
I think humanities are more important than ever. Understanding each other and learning through that understanding is what will make us better and kinder people. As a photographer and documentarian, my most recent work focuses on critical histories of land and waterways in Iraq, my ancestral homeland. I’m very connected to the people and the land that I portray through my work and in all of my projects I ask: In what ways can my work honour the people and places it speaks off and engages?
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I recently came across this wonderful platform called BARARI which “is an (open science) platform to responsibly share knowledge about wild food plants in Palestine.” The website (so far) consists of 467 species of plants and flowers photographed in the field by a research team in Palestine.
What is a fun fact about you?
On the same theme, I love photographing flowers!