Between 1981 and 1985, six major housing and institutional complexes rose along Haifa Street in Baghdad, even as the Iran–Iraq War raged on. International and local teams worked under accelerated timelines that demanded strict coordination and standardization. On-site exhibitions of construction materials and technologies, alongside public art commissions, artists’ diaries and the Saddam Centre for the Arts (1986), reinforced the street’s identity as a site of display. Yet its cultural assets were steadily dispersed: sanctions in the 1990s forced its academic residents to sell their libraries, while battles exposed its interiors through US military footage between 2004 and 2008 – images that contrast sharply with the sentimental photographs now shared by residents online. This article traces the exhibitory quality of the street’s layered history, as it reappears in the woven textiles of Battles in a Future Estate – Haifa Street (2024), created by the author.
Ala Younis (Mon,) studied this question.