Berlin Baghdad

An itinerary. An impossible journey between two places.

 

The Berlin–Baghdad railway was the great imperial artery of its age, and it never fully ran. What it opened was a corridor — one that ideas would travel decades later, until in 1941 they reached my grandmother's street in Baghdad. The line never functioned. Its consequences did.

I travel this corridor in the other direction. Not to the Baghdad on the map, which I cannot reach, but to the one I already know: a city of stories told across a table, plural, gone before I was born.

Etchings, palms printed on fabric, plaster reliefs placed to peek through the lines of a story as though pushing through the wall from the other side. 

This exhibition is an invitation to travel to a place of memory that does not quite exist and is nonetheless palpable, vibrant, inhabited.