ABSTRACT
References to Iraq's cultural heritage have constituted a central feature of the country's protest movement. Calls for an Iraq premised on its plurality and shared histories were widely made in the October 2019 protests, known as the “October Revolution.” Those protests, the largest in recent memory, which led to the killing of over 700 and the injury of 20,000 Iraqis, were accompanied by thousands of new artworks. Muhasasa, the US-imposed ethno-religious quota system that underlies the distribution of power and resources in Iraq's political system, was widely criticised within the national protest movement. Significantly, the imposition of sectarian politics since 2003 involved not only the sectarian restructuring of its politics and national wealth but also the organised distribution, division, and entrenchment of public symbols along ethno-religious lines. I show how protestors and artists responded to the post-2003 political order through new forms of socially anchored heritage-making. Specifically, this chapter explores the ways in which artwork relating to the emergent protest infrastructure as well as cultural heritage, specifically from Mesopotamian, Islamic, and modern histories, contested dominant hierarchies of power and attempted to imagine and represent a new post-sectarian Iraq.
