The 2020 Nasher Prize Laureate Michael Rakowitz offers a deeply considered vision of sculpture’s possibilities in the face of political and humanitarian crises. Drawing upon his heritage as an American artist of Iraqi Jewish descent, he has confronted the complex legacies of centuries of conflict in the Middle East, most recently in the Iraq War and its aftermath. His ongoing reconstructions of the thousands of ancient artifacts looted or destroyed during the war not only turn a contemporary eye on objects commonly included among humanity’s oldest sculptures but bring our attention to vulnerable populations that have suffered violence and displacement in parallel to attacks on their cultural patrimony. Rakowitz’s “placeholders” for these disappeared objects—made from Arabic-language newspapers and the packaging for foods intrinsic to Iraqi cooking—are but the most visible elements of a body of work that the artist has characterized as site specific,1 existing in the midst of social exchanges that include collaborative workshops, shipping services, musical performances, and communal dinners. The resulting projects are correspondingly open-ended and ongoing, based on the artist’s conviction that “a project shouldn’t disappear until the problem it addresses disappears.”2 For over two decades, Rakowitz has addressed some of the most urgent issues of our time with works formed from unlikely correspondences and intersections, often across great temporal and geographical distances, that endow remote geopolitical situations with a humane immediacy and foster impulses toward healing and activism.
“In Michael Rakowitz, the Nasher Prize jury has selected a laureate whose work wrestles in unique and revelatory ways with many of the complex questions of history, heritage, and identity that are so much at the forefront of contemporary culture and politics,” says Director Jeremy Strick. “Interrogating objects and materials—their history and associations—Rakowitz weaves dense webs of meaning in distinct bodies of work rich with insight and surprise.”
