Art Box #11: Oyouni by Louis-Cyprien Rials

You wake up in 2500 BCE, in the marshes near Ur, one of Sumer's greatest cities. You're a storyteller. At dawn, you push your mashoof through a maze of reeds as herons rise from the water. Your home is a mudhif — a soaring house woven entirely from reeds, where travelers are welcomed, and stories are passed from one generation to the next. There are no books yet, only memory. You recite the deeds of Inanna, Enki, and Gilgamesh to farmers, fishermen, and merchants returning from Ur. If your words are powerful enough, a temple scribe may one day press them into wet clay. If not, they will vanish with the last person who remembers them. In 2023, a group of young Iraqis will retrace your path. They will sing your songs, wade through your marshes, watch your sunrises and your herons take flight — through your eyes, though now 3D-printed using oil pulled from deep beneath the same land you call home. A material unknown to you, sleeping for millions of years beneath your feet. Welcome to Oyouni, by Louis-Cyprien Rials — a multimedia installation on identity, resilience, and cultural continuity in post-conflict Iraq.

Louis-Cyprien Rials reminds you of a kind of artist that seems to have almost disappeared — perhaps sometime around the 1920s, with a brief comeback among the beatniks of the 1960s. The sort of daredevil who jumps on a motorbike and heads for places that exist in political grey zones: Transnistria, Artsakh, North Cyprus, and beyond. In 2010, he rode a motorbike across Iraq for the first time. He returned in 2015 to document the persecution of Yazidis and Christians by ISIS. Then, in 2021, escaping France’s COVID restrictions, he moved to Iraq and described himself as a refugee. But he was fascinated with other regions as well. He’s filmed ziggurats with drones, wandered through Chernobyl, commissioned Afghan weavers to create carpets about 9/11, drone warfare, and the opium trade, made friends with people from every imaginable walk of life — and through it all, he kept filming and taking pictures. Passionately and unapologetically.

Through his friendships with Iraqis, Rials noticed something peculiar. Many young people no longer introduced themselves simply as Iraqi. Instead, their bios identified them as Mesopotamian or Sumerian. Some even wrote their names in cuneiform. The nickname of Iraq’s national football team — the Lions of Mesopotamia — speaks to the same impulse.