News 

Art and Its Objects: 5 Essays on Contemporary Art Selected by Jonathan Watkins

Ruya Notebooks is a new educational publishing initiative that will release two titles a year. For each Notebook a well known artist, curator or critic will select five short texts that they have identified as fundamental to their creative development. These texts will then be translated into Arabic, in most cases for the first time,…
Interview 

Plastic Women and Teahouses: interview with the artist Rozhgar Mustafa

Rozhgar Mustafa is a video and performance artist based in Sulaymaniya. After training as a painter at the Institute of Fine Arts and the University of Sulaymaniya, Mustafa soon began experimenting with video, performance and ready-made objects to make works about women and womanhood in Iraq. In 2011, Mustafa arranged for a group of protesters…
Interview 

Family Trees and Pop Culture Rebels: director Samir on his documentary film Iraqi Odyssey.

On 2 December, the Ruya Foundation co-sponsored the Iraqi premiere of the award-winning documentary film Iraqi Odyssey (2014). The film traces the epic journey of the filmmaker Samir’s own family who left Iraq more than half a century ago, and are now scattered across the world. Samir (b.1955, Iraq) is a Swiss-Iraqi film director, writer and…
News, Portfolio 

Happy Birthday, Rifat Chadirji

Rifat Chadirji, one of the most important living architects from Iraq, turned 90 this month. As an architect and planning consultant Chadirji played a central role in the urban development of Baghdad from the 1950s to the 70s. He created a new urban aesthetic for the city, which was a synthesis of Modernist principles and…