Rakowitz’s heritage haunts his work. The artist’s recent commission in London’s Trafalgar Square was a recreation of the ancient Iraqi monument of Lamassu, destroyed by ISIS. Smaller destroyed artefacts were recreated at Jane Lombard Gallery in New York in January. Previously, he’s staged dinners served on plates looted from Saddam Hussein’s palaces and run a truck serving food cooked by Iraqi immigrants and American veterans. Last year he withdrew from the Whitney Biennial in protest over board member Warren Kanders’s connections to the arms industry. This year he got into a spat with MoMA PS1 after the curators of a group show, Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars, 1991–2011, refused his request to pause his work in protest over trustees Larry Fink’s and Leon Black’s financial links to, respectively, the operation of private prisons and a defence contractor responsible for the 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. On being told this, Rakowitz took direct action, wandering into the show with a remote and pausing his video himself.
The ArtReview Power 100 is presented by BMW Group Culture
