Panel Discussion: Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes

Tamara Abdul Hadi and Omar Sirri provide insight into Abdul Hadi’s ongoing project Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes, the development of her exhibition in the IC Vitrines, and her work as Jackman Humanities Institute Artist-in-Residence. Featuring a special guest presentation by Mustafa Hashem, an Ahwari activist from the Maysan province in Iraq, this conversation was moderated by U of T Scarborough faculty member Esmat Elhalaby.

Video courtesy of Peppercorn Imagine Studio.

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Tamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer whose work is concerned with the historic and contemporary representation of her own culture, in its diversity. Her photography and commentary focus on the dispossessed and marginalized, the underside of Orientalist representations, the underground of settler societies, and the changing social and environmental landscapes of the Middle East.

Omar Sirri is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. His current book project, tentatively titled Circulating the State: An Ethnography of Checkpoints in Contemporary Baghdad, explores how infrastructures of security in Iraq's capital city work to produce the state, even amidst persistent security breakdowns and failures.

Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of Transnational History at UTSC. He works principally on the intellectual history of West and South Asia. His book, Parting Gifts of Empire is forthcoming from the University of California Press next year.