Middle East & Africa

Ali Yass

Now; 1992

2016–2019

Now; 1992 is Ali Yass’s attempt to remake his childhood drawings, which were lost after he was forced to leave Iraq following the 2003 US occupation. The drawings are chimeric compositions of animated limbs, animal, human, and machine, that seem to hurl in all directions and mediums, unified as colorful figurations posed against blank backgrounds, rendering the curious characters suspended in time. This suspension materializes the artist’s view on violence and temporality, on which he has claimed: “I will not talk about war because it is from the past. But I will talk about resistance because it is ‘now’; that now which is deferred forever.”

Yass refers to these figures as “post-disaster beings” or beings in the midst of disaster—though they may appear friendly or even comical, they are also traumatized by violence. The artist explains that he is not interested in retelling history with this work, as he poignantly remark about the moment Baghdad fell: “I didn’t think of that day as a rebirth, but rather a ground zero.” Instead, this work is an attempt to understand and represent history through the lens of Yass’s personal, embodied knowledge, specifically regarding the imagery and feelings that he can recall from the events he experienced as a child.

Ali Yass is a painter and filmmaker whose work entangles personal and collective memory in its psycho-affective interrogation of power. Though sometimes experimenting with video and text, Yass’s drawing process remains the most embodied and autobiographical part of his practice, using the blank paper to channel the atrocities of the Iraq war that he witnessed as a child.Yass carries his process on the move, generating collage-esque figures from the varying energetic paces and sensory impressions his movement entails. Yass’s work engages with the concepts of resistance, documentation, and the representation of fear.

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Ali Yass Now; 1992

Ali Yass

Now; 1992