VCU hosting traveling exhibition ‘It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq’

VCU Communications & Public Relations

“It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq,” a new exhibition by Turner Prize-winning British artist Jeremy Deller, will visit the VCU campus on March 27.

The project, which is commissioned and produced by Creative Time and the New Museum, encourages public examination of the history, present circumstances and future of Iraq through unscripted, nonpartisan conversations in cities across the country. The exhibition will be open at VCU from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on March 27 in the Park Plaza area of campus between the Pollak and Hibbs buildings. In addition, Deller will give an artist’s talk on March 27 at 11 a.m. in the VCU Student Commons Theater, 907 Floyd Ave.

Deller conceived “It Is What It Is” to stimulate unmediated dialogue about Iraq and Americans’ relationship to it as people and as a nation.

“I have read a ton of books and articles about the war but short of going to Iraq there is no substitute for meeting someone who has actually lived or been there, hence the core part of this project,” Deller said.

At VCU, two guest experts will interact with visitors to the exhibition – Jonathan Harvey and Esam Pasha. Harvey is an Iraq war veteran and recently demobilized Psychological Operations platoon sergeant, and Pasha is an Iraqi refugee, artist and former translator for the Chief Advisor in the British Embassy of Baghdad.

Also traveling with the experts, who will arrive by RV, is a car destroyed in a bombing on Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad in March 2007. The tragedy killed more than 30 people. The vehicle is intended to ground conversations in facts, figures and eyewitness descriptions and to serve as a visual aid to prompt open dialogue and civil conversation.

Deller would like visitors to the project to bring objects related to Iraq to discuss with the guest experts.

The VCU stop for the exhibition is part of a three-week road trip from New York to Los Angeles that will include visits to 13 cities. The exhibition started with an installation at the New Museum in New York City from Feb. 10 to March 22 that included the participation of more than 30 people with a variety of firsthand experiences of Iraq. The installation received thousands of visitors.

When the road trip portion of “It Is What It Is” arrives in Los Angeles, the project will go on view at the Hammer Museum and then will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago as part of the Three M Project, a collaboration between the New Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum to jointly commission, exhibit and acquire important works of contemporary art by artists whose work has not yet received significant recognition.

More information about “It Is What It Is,” including daily written and video updates as the project travels, can be found at http://www.conversationsaboutiraq.org.