The retrospective exhibition “Alì Assaf. Works 1973–2011”, hosted by the Museum Laboratory of Contemporary Art at Sapienza University of Rome until 29 May, constitutes the first comprehensive survey dedicated to the artist Alì Assaf (Basra, 1950).
The retrospective, curated by Arianna Desideri, does not merely retrace Assaf’s career chronologically from 1973—the year of his arrival in Rome to study at the Academy of Fine Arts—to 2011, when he took part in the 54th Venice Biennale as an artist and Commissioner of the Iraqi Pavilion. Rather, through a selection of representative works, it conveys the complexity of a body of work in which autobiography, diaspora and formal experimentation are constantly intertwined.
The exhibition highlights the ‘post-mediality’ that characterises Assaf’s artistic output, exploring the convergence of different media. In this sense, the self-portrait, which recurs regularly throughout the exhibition, becomes a privileged vantage point from which to observe the free movement across media. Starting with the early painted self-portraits of the 1970s—a period of formation and assimilation of European visual languages—moving through the giant photographic emulsion of Sono ancora vivo (1991), and on to the performances of the 1990s, to arrive at the video installation Narciso (2010), the self-portrait thus becomes a space for negotiation between different visual systems and the site of a complex construction of identity.
Absence, on the other hand, characterises the work I miei vicini (1982), a photographic series documenting the balcony of the artist’s neighbours throughout May 1981, without ever directly showing those who live there, allowing the laundry on the line and the variations of daily life to convey the invisible presence of bodies. The seemingly voyeuristic gaze reveals, in every shot, a desire for contact and an inevitable distance; it recounts the condition of those who inhabit a place whilst seeking to establish a bond with it, yet remaining in a lateral position of observation and partial estrangement. But it is also a gaze that belongs to San Lorenzo, the neighbourhood where Ali Assaf has lived and worked permanently since the mid-1970s. Not a neutral backdrop, but a place of strong identity—working-class, university-oriented, politically charged—permeated by collective memories, neighbourhood practices, and urban and social stratifications that foster connection. My Neighbours reflects a deeply local experience, rooted in the daily life of San Lorenzo, yet takes on a universal significance through a syncretic dynamic.
Diaspora does not appear here as a traumatic event, but as a minute and ordinary experience, made up of intense closeness. In Assaf’s case, however, this condition is not confined to the intimate or everyday sphere. Migration, which initially took place for educational reasons and was later driven by political imperatives, is deeply intertwined with the developments of Iraqi history. In the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s rise to power, Assaf became the representative in Italy of a network of cultural and political opposition, with which he actively collaborated on various initiatives. Indeed, Assaf’s militant stance also emerged in his curatorial work, denouncing in 1989 the invisibility of migrant subjectivities within the national art system and the problem of the lack of representation of non-Western artists. This intention was reaffirmed at the 2011 Biennale, with the aim of offering the contemporary Iraqi scene an international platform after a 35-year absence from the event.
The Gulf War and the impossibility of maintaining contact with his family in Iraq intensified the theme of exile and uprooting in his work of the 1990s, though never in a tragic manner.
In Io e loro sotto il primo cielo (1991), eleven Persian rugs form the backdrop to a photographic installation reconstructing the artist’s family tree, which in turn is set within a clipeus offset from the composition. The theme of distance seems to be explored in its familial and cultural dimensions, but, ironically, the carpets come from Porta Portese and the lineage depicted is fictitious, made up of prints in a Persian-style, antique portraits and visual materials salvaged from magazines or flea markets.
The same irony and the same ambiguous relationship between reality and fiction recur in the series Saluti da Baghdad (2003). In the background appears the now iconic image of US soldiers tearing down the statue of Saddam Hussein; within this historical and media-driven scenario, however, the artist inserts figures of Italian friends and acquaintances, attributing to them imaginary identities and biographies that are at times almost comical. The work’s format replicates a television screen, showing Iraq not as a directly accessible place, but as a mediated image, reconstructed and permeated by personal and collective projections.
The diaspora experience is generally marked by a shared mythology founded on return, but, in this case, the return to Basra, postponed until 2008, produces no reconciliation. On the contrary, it takes the form of a brutal confrontation with a city now beyond recognition. In Al Basrah, the Venice of the East (2010), the memory of the hometown is set against the decay and destruction of the present. Basra, once evoked as the ‘Venice of the East’, appears scarred by rubbish, waste, and environmental and social transformations. The original installation of the work for the 2011 Venice Biennale featured a pyramid of dates placed in the centre of the room, one side of which was poisoned, highlighting the environmental contamination caused by the devastating effects of war. The return does not restore an intact origin, but confirms a rift between memory and reality.
Here resound the verses of Konstantinos Kavafis that Assaf had translated into Arabic calligraphy in Ithaca (1997): “Ithaca has given you the beautiful journey; without her, you would never have set out on the road. She has nothing more to give you. And if you find her poor, Ithaca will not have disappointed you for that.”
Ithaca is no longer the place to find oneself again, but that which made the journey possible, the displacement, which is not a parenthesis between departure and return, but a permanent condition.
The exhibition’s main merit is that it does not present Assaf merely as a testimonial figure, a migrant, an exile or a representative of an ‘other’ culture, but as an artist capable of developing a complex and politically conscious language. His work demonstrates that the diaspora is not a subject to be represented, but rather a critical stance: a way of viewing the world from a decentralised perspective, capable of challenging dominant narratives, identity absolutisms and overly linear artistic genealogies.
The exhibition also inaugurates a new line of research at Sapienza University Museum, under the direction of Francesca Gallo, oriented towards postcolonial critical horizons. This is no minor point: Assaf is an artist who has been active in Rome for over fifty years, embedded in the Italian and international art scene, yet long remaining on the margins of full museum systematisation. The exhibition, therefore, is not merely a retrospective, but also an anthological re-tracing which, through the decision to include works that have never or rarely been exhibited, affords them the opportunity to be documented and catalogued, as well as to be given a new lease of life. Through Ali Assaf. Works 1973–2011, the MLAC sheds light on the presence of the diaspora in Rome, confronting us with our condition as inhabitants of transnational spaces.
Abitare la distanza. Alì Assaf, Opere, 1973 – 2011, curated by Arianna Desideri
MLAC- Museo Laboratorio, Università La Sapienza, Rome, 21.04-29.05.2026
images: (cover 1) Alì Assaf, “Me and Them Under the First Sky,” 1991, photographic reproduction of the installation in Room 1, photo: Gabriele Pallai (2) Alì Assaf, “My Neighbors,” 1981, photographs with bronze on wood, photo: Gabriele (3) Alì Assaf, “Greetings from Baghdad: Abbas”, 2003, photographic print mounted on Forex, photo: Gabriele Pallai (4) Alì Assaf, “Al Basrah, the Venice of the East”, 2010, photographic print, photo: Gabriele Pallai (5) Alì Assaf, “Ithaca”, 1997, acrylic on canvas, photo: Gabriele Pallai
