Artist Ali Eyal’s practice aims to explore the complex relationship between community and politics using different media such as video, installation, photography, and painting. Through his work he examines social attitudes specific to the context of Baghdad and Iraq. Eyal’s work situates itself within the tradition of, and as a radical break from, the Iraqi modernist tradition. His process is at once frantic and meditative, blurring distinctions between traditional craftsmanship and contemporary research-based methodologies, thus carving a space in which flickering technical precision is able to merge with hallucinatory, often illegible articulations of collective trauma and injury. Having lived through and witnessed atrocities committed by the US military during its occupation of Iraq, Eyal mobilizes his situated knowledge to lend a voice to and make sense of the effects of a generation brutalized by foreign interference and disoriented by the forced disappearance of their cultural inheritance. In this vein, his film Tonight’s Programme, which debuted at the 2019 Sharjah Film Platform and was screened at the Beirut Art Center and the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, merges Duke Ellington’s 1963 performance at the Baghdad Khulud Hall with the violent coup Saddam Hussein carried out in the same theatre 16 years later. The work activates a process of mourning and commemorating the premature deaths of those around him who continue to fall prey to interminable cycles of state violence.