Review of ‘The Waiting Gardens of the North’, Michael Rakowitz at BALTIC

Simal Rafique

Writer and third-year History of Art student Simal Rafique reviews Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’ exhibition ‘The Waiting Gardens of the North’ at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in Gateshead, Newcastle. This major project, involving refuge-seeking communities, was commissioned by Baltic along with the IWM 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund, a national partnership programme of over 20 artist commissions dealing with war and conflict, led by Imperial War Museums and made possible thanks to the success of Peter Jackson’s critically acclaimed film They Shall Not Grow Old, co-commissioned by IWM and 14-18 NOW. The exhibition, featuring a living garden tended by communities who have experienced displacement, is on view until 26 May 2024.

Comprised of the Greek nostos (home) and algos (pain), nostalgia is defined as homesickness and longing for something far away or long ago.[1] This feeling of nostalgia is unmistakeable in Michael Rakowitz’ installation The Waiting Gardens of the North at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead, showing until 26 May 2024.

The Palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh (present-day Mosul, Iraq), which possibly inspired the legend of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, constitutes the heart of this horticultural installation: a papier mâché relief panel made from SWANA, African and South-Asian food packaging. At the centre, a bearded Assyrian king is spotted admiring the environs of his golden palace, a paradisical landscape irrigated by a streaming aqueduct (see main image). The metaphor of the garden as a site of miracle, growth and transformation is a real sanctuary for the migrant community in Newcastle awaiting a more stable future in the context of forced displacement. A hanging garden for lives hanging in the balance, the artist quips in a welcome letter to his guests which can be found on the Baltic’s website. Drawing from his Iraqi-Jewish heritage, Rakowitz’s own diasporic identity as an American citizen based in Chicago reveals his sensitivity to questions of immigration and global politics.

Today the looted relics of Nineveh, situated in the Assyrian galleries of the British Museum, relate to our general understanding of imperial museums as places of theft, violence and crime. In similar works Rakowitz investigates the loss of archaeological artefacts looted during the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Baghdad. As such, his practice of “problem-solving and trouble-making” as a professor and conceptual artist has comprised the colourful recreations of such artefacts referred to as mere “ghosts” of their stolen originals. However, The Waiting Gardens of the North animates the discussion of preservation and ownership beyond any false historicity, especially the clichéd Romantic affinity with the ruins of a lost epoch (interestingly, the arrival of the Assyrian artefacts in imperial London captured the interests of Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley). [2]

Instead, Rakowitz’ three-dimensional recreation of the panel through the floor plan of the surrounding garden beds allows for an embodied viewing that engages the senses of touch and smell. The garden features trees, plants, flowers, and herbs from landscapes across the world, personally requested by Newcastle’s diverse migrant communities as part of the project’s aim to realise a place of belonging. After all, the original Hanging Gardens of Babylon signified an exercise in nostalgia and yearning: according to legend, Nebuchadnezzar built the gardens to alleviate his wife Amytis’ homesickness as she longed for the mountainous landscape of her native home Media (located in modern-day Iran). Special requests from visitors include date palms, olive trees, fig trees, quince trees, pear trees, and tamarisk.

Moreover, the project is accompanied by four stations: for tea-drying, spice-grinding, distillation of tinctures, and cooking. In his letter, Rakowitz notes how displaced persons who are temporarily resettled in hotels often do not have access to kitchens – being unable to host, they are perpetually stuck in the position of guests. By returning a sense of agency and independence to these communities, the activist element of the project is refreshing because it focuses upon an overlooked aspect of the experience of forced displacement.

In fact, the exhibition has involved close collaboration with the Comfrey Project, an organisation that empowers refugees and asylum seekers to develop new personal skills in the space of a community garden, providing access to horticultural activities for mental wellbeing. Other essential organisations include the registered charity West End Refugee Service. Since 1999, WERS has promoted social integration through a policy of compassion that values the dignity of displaced individuals in Tyneside. To achieve this, they have combatted the barriers of prejudice that these communities face by creating opportunities and platforms for social justice and inclusion. Michael Rakowitz is personally indebted to architect-artist Sandi Hilal’s collaborative project Al Madhafah - The Living Room, an ongoing global network of spaces, which looks to invert the relationship between guest and host that refugees find themselves in through the space of the domestic interior.

Perhaps it is ironic that Gateshead should become a place of sanctuary today for migrant communities, since the industry of shipbuilding upon the River Tyne was integral to the British Empire’s import and export of resources. Then again, the diversity of Newcastle’s Black and ethnic minority communities can be traced back to the 1890s, with thousands of seamen from Yemen settled along the riverbanks in search of exciting, professional opportunities in South Shields. [3]

Small black labels scattered around the plant specimens offer us more than Latin species names and gardening instructions (in fact, the artist confesses in the letter that that he is neither gardener, nor cook!) Behind the centre relief panel, a label quotes Palestinian national poet and writer Mahmoud Darwish, ‘If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.’ In Palestinian territories the olive tree is a major agricultural crop that provides the population with a steady source of income from the sale of its fruit and its silky, golden oils. As such olives are more than symbolic of Palestinian livelihood and a deep-rooted, sovereign connection to the landscape of the Levant [4]; its deliberate destruction has become a regular feature of the Israeli occupation, with significant usage of herbicidal warfare in recent years. [5]

Tinged with melancholy another label stuck in the soil of a flowerpot mourns, ‘Damascus used to smell of roses, now it reeks of gunpowder,’ and ‘the Damask rose will not come back to life until this war is over.’ The name of the Damask rose refers to the city of Damascus in Syria, which yields the flower en masse to produce rose water, essential oils and perfumes as well as food flavouring for traditional sweets, such as Turkish delight. One of the oldest and most sought-after historic roses, it garnered the attention of William Shakespeare who referenced the Damask rose in his popular Sonnet 130: ‘I have seen roses damask'd, red and white. But no such roses see I in her cheeks.’ Today the rose that used to adorn the gardens and balconies of Syria is in decline after years of violent conflict and bloodshed, and the preservation of the flower has become a symbolic concern for farmers and traders. In the popular language of flowers, the rose represents true love and passion, but here in Gateshead its blossoming possibly acquires a new meaning of hope and resilience for Syrian refugees.

Velvety rose petals pinched from the tea-drying station fill the pockets of my coat with the heavy sweetness of their perfume. Exhausted and homesick from endlessly waiting on delayed trains from Newcastle to Stoke-on-Trent where I live, my rediscovery of these rose petals is precisely the sort of comfort that Michael Rakowitz’ installation intends to offer: a garden for those in waiting.

Footnotes

[1] Andreas Huyssen, ‘Nostalgia for Ruins’, Grey Room 23:1, 2006, 7.

[2] Andrew M. Stauffer, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti and The Burdens of Nineveh’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 2005, 369-394.

[3] Matthew Kipling, Tina Gharavi, and Youssef Nabil, ‘The Last of the Dictionary Men: Stories from the South Shields Yemeni Sailors’, 2013.

[4] Chrisoula Lionis, ‘Peasant, Revolutionary, Celebrity: The Subversion of Popular Iconography in Contemporary Palestinian Art’, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8:1, 2015, 72.                         

[5] Miriam Berger, ‘Israeli Spraying of Herbicide near Gaza Harming Palestinian Crops’, The Guardian, 19 July, 2019.