Tamara Abdul Hadi: Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes

Image courtesy Tamara Abdul Hadi

Tamara Abdul Hadi
Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes

August 28, 2024 – May 11, 2025
Instructional Centre Vitrines, University of Toronto Scarborough
Presented by the Doris McCarthy Gallery as part of the 2024/2025 Jackman Humanities Institute Artist-in-Residence program, a partnership between the Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Department of Historical & Cultural Studies, Department of Arts, Culture & Media, and Doris McCarthy Gallery, U of T Scarborough.

As a child growing up in the Iraqi diaspora, Tamara Abdul Hadi’s visual imagination of Iraq was largely influenced by books in her family’s home library. One of these books was Return to the Marshes, a documentation of the Southern Iraqi marshlands by British writer and photographer duo, Gavin Young and Nik Wheeler, published in 1977. The Marshes, or Al Ahwar in Arabic, is a wetland area located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what was once the centre of ancient Mesopotamia. As few photographs of the Marshes were published at that time, images from Young and Wheeler’s book circulated widely, and continue to do so to this day.

Abdul Hadi’s ongoing project Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes researches the genesis and proliferation of imperial images of the Southern Iraqi Marshes. She is visiting and photographing the marshlands anew, capturing the contemporary environment, where the local inhabitants, the Ahwaris, still follow the same way of life: living by the land, raising buffalo, and building homes using native plants. Creating digital interventions that layer new meaning atop Young and Wheeler’s original pages, Abdul Hadi’s work advances a decolonial visuality that speaks to current, transdisciplinary debates about environmental transformations in the wake of modern colonial projects of statecraft, industrialization, and urbanization.

Image courtesy Tamara Abdul Hadi

Tamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer whose work is concerned with the historic and contemporary representation of her own culture, in its diversity. Along with being a photographer, Abdul Hadi is an educator who has taught in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, the UAE, Kuwait, Tunisia, and Canada. Her photography and commentary focus on the dispossessed and marginalized, the underside of Orientalist representations, the underground of settler societies, and the changing social and environmental landscapes of the Middle East. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide, and her debut monograph Picture of an Arab Man was published in 2022.

Doris McCarthy Gallery
University of Toronto Scarborough
1265 Military Trail
Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4
416.287.7007
dmg.utsc@utoronto.ca
dorismccarthygallery.utoronto.ca

The Instructional Centre Vitrines are located in the atrium of the Instructional Centre at U of T Scarborough, 1095 Military Trail. The building is open Monday – Saturday, and is wheelchair accessible.

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Image descriptions:
1) Image of the spread of a book, featuring a smaller colour photograph of a girl holding an oar while in a boat, lined up with and layered over a large, older-looking black and white photograh of a similar boat on a body of water. In the book’s margins is written the phrase “Mona, 12, pushes along the river” in English and Arabic.
2) Photograph of a bearded man dressed in a coat and jeans, standing amongst a marshy landscape, with buildings and palm trees in the background.