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A journal for storytelling, arguments, and discovery through tangential conversations.
"A civilizing mission" : in conversation with artist Ihsan Saad Ihsan Tahir
Monday, August 24, 2026 | Joyce Joumaa
Ihsan ‌Saad ‌Ihsan ‌Tahir is a Kurdish-Iraqi visual artist living and working in Denmark. His work grows out of displacement, inheritance, and the strange, almost choreographed logic of state paperwork, moving through sculpture as a way to think about the body—the place where official history and lived memory tug in opposite directions. His research often begins in museum holdings and in the language of archaeological reconstruction, then pushes back, prying open what colonial vitrines and administrative files have pressed into “artefacts.” Across an interdisciplinary body of work, he shows how citation, humor, and a well-timed gesture can reopen the question of who gets sovereignty over an image, and under what terms.