The history of Iraq in the twentieth century, and perhaps the Middle East more broadly, is punctuated by an intellectual shift that has, for the most part, escaped the attention of scholars. It might be characterized as a shift from a problem of representation introduced by the rise of left-wing politics, to a problem of experience created by its failure. This shift registers in the work of writers and artists, where the depiction of the social world gave way to an exploration of states of being. The paradigm for that turn inward in modern art was set by the artist Kadhim Haidar, in a series of paintings exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, in 1965, under the title The Epic of the Martyr [Malḥamat al-shahīd]. The paintings reconstructed imagery from the mourning processions that annually commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, al-Husayn. This paper argues that the ritual imagery contains a grammar of experience, forged in the early history of Islam, that linked justice to a state of being, and that the transposition of the imagery into painting activated that grammar in the artwork.

中文翻译：

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形式的迁移：古代正义观念在现代艺术作品中再现

20 世纪伊拉克的历史，或许更广泛的中东地区，被一种知识转变所打断，这种转变在很大程度上没有引起学者的注意。它的特点可能是从左翼政治兴起引起的代表问题转变为左翼政治失败造成的经验问题。这种转变体现在作家和艺术家的作品中，对社会世界的描绘让位于对存在状态的探索。现代艺术向内转向的范式是由艺术家 Kadhim Haidar 在 1965 年在巴格达国家现代艺术博物馆展出的一系列画作中设定的，标题为“殉道者史诗”[Malḥamat al-shahīd] . 这些画从每年纪念先知穆罕默德的孙子侯赛因殉难的哀悼游行中重建图像。本文认为，仪式意象包含一种在伊斯兰教早期历史中形成的经验语法，将正义与存在状态联系起来，将意象转换为绘画激活了艺术品中的这种语法。