Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to participate in the Armory Show’s 2021 Platform Section from September 9th to 12th, 2021. Platform is one of the core-curated sections of the fair, dedicated to large-scale artworks installed throughout the halls of the Javits Center in Manhattan. Can you hear the fault lines breathing?, curated by Claudia Schmuckli, will feature eight projects that speak to the urgency of working toward new models of bridging fault lines grounded in empathy and understanding. The section will showcase Michael Rakowitz's 2019 series The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (Room F, Section 1, Northwest Palace of Nimrud), which debuted at Jane Lombard Gallery in January 2020.
Rakowitz’s ongoing project, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, was first shown in 2007 at the former Lombard Freid Gallery. For the initial iteration, Rakowitz merged data from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, UCLA, and Interpol to recreate artifacts that had been destroyed or looted. His reliefs from the Palace of Nimrud continue to inspire conversations about colonialism, preservation, and the culturcide of a civilization.
For this exhibition, Rakowitz presents reliefs from Room F, a banquet courtyard within King Ashurnasirpal II’s 9th-century BC palace built in Kalhu, the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud. By the time the palace was destroyed by ISIS in 2015, 400 of the 600 gypsum reliefs that once lined the walls had been removed by archaeologists during expeditions and sent to museums in the West. In each iteration of The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Rakowitz and his studio team reappear the destroyed reliefs and replicate the architectural layout of the original rooms in which the panels were installed. The gaps between the reliefs reflect pieces that were extracted by the excavators, destroyed, or looted from the National Museum of Iraq following the 2003 US invasion. The recreated reliefs are crafted out of Middle Eastern food packaging, Arabic newspapers, and other found media, acknowledging the continued history of displacement in Iraq and creating what the artist calls a palimpsest of different moments of removal.
In parallel to the installation at Platform, a small selection of Rakowitz’s sculptures from The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist will be on display in the gallery viewing room at 58 White Street through October 2021.
