Subtitles for Stolen Pictures
It is 2007 in Iraq; the brutal US military occupation rages on. Amid the violence, a subtitled narrative transmits the day-to-day of an anonymous Iraqi woman, imbuing found images with a strange intimacy. After the woman’s interior space is raided by the US military, her body is found dumped in the river — yet her subtitles mysteriously continue. When I made this video, there was only corporate-run media for news about the US war in Iraq. I would obsessively look at, collect and archive images from Iraq, trying to get closer than the pixels would allow.
Rheim Alkadhi (1973) is a visual artist born in the US; she lived as a child in Baghdad. Her social-practice based projects have been conducted in Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan. Her monograph Majnoon Field Guide (2023) was recently published by Archive Books Berlin alongside Templates for Liberation (2024), published by ICA London. Her last film, Arrival Points (2021), is a long form video essay that presents the island of Lesvos as migratory ‘middle passage’ for dispossessed people en route to Europe. She currently lives in Berlin, often working elsewhere.
Iraque/EUA, 2007, 8’
director
Rheim Alkadhi
