Michael Rakowitz
Proxies for Poets and Palaces
September 27, 2025 – March 15, 2026
Stavanger Art Museum
Henrik Ibsens gate 55
Stavanger, 4021
Norway
Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz (SMVisS ’98) draws upon his Arab-Jewish heritage to scrutinize Western interventions in the Middle East. His works foreground the significance of cultural heritage in times of war and probe the ways in which societies negotiate the relative value of human life and cultural monuments.
At the center of this exhibition are eight reliefs conceived specifically for Stavanger Art Museum, presented as a room within a room. These reliefs are reconstructions of sculptures that once adorned the walls of a chamber in the Assyrian Northwest Palace of Kalhu (near present-day Mosul). They form part of Rakowitz’s ongoing series The invisible enemy should not exist, originally initiated as a response to the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq. Rather than replicating the lost objects, the artist “reappears” them using discarded materials to evoke their absence. In this way, the artworks are “ghosts” of the originals—meant to haunt the viewer by serving as reminders of loss, rather than as replacements.
Built in the 9th century BCE by Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE), the palace became a site of extensive excavation and removal beginning in 1849, with reliefs and objects dispersed across Western museums and collections. The eight panels presented here remained in situ until March 2015, when ISIS destroyed the palace in the wake of the Iraq War. Empty sections within the installation signify panels that were extracted and taken abroad during the 19th and 20th centuries.
The exhibition also features What dust will rise? and ’Im good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze. Through an interplay of film, sculpture, and collected objects, Rakowitz revisits historical events with acute sensitivity to nuance and contradiction. His oeuvre underscores art’s potential to disrupt entrenched imperialist modes of thought. This exhibition constitutes the first major survey of Rakowitz’s work in Norway.
More information on the exhibition can be found here.
