Monumental mythologies in the Baghdadi relief murals of Mohammed Ghani Hikmat

Iraqi sculptor Mohammed Ghani Hikmat is well known for his monumental interpretations of Iraq’s literary and historical traditions. His public sculptures are ubiquitous in Baghdad and have themselves become myth-making devices, rather than simply conduits for the past to speak. This article explores how Ghani’s Baghdadi monuments utilize the principles of istilham al-turath to transform Iraq’s past into a potent representation of the present. I argue that Ghani harnesses the visual strategies of ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seals, stelae, monumental orthostats, along with Islamic manuscript painting, to mythologize Iraqi modernity. This was in service to the sculptor’s desire to shape the city of Baghdad into a temporally diverse urban environment where the modern spaces of Iraq would coexist with a rich historical legacy. Ghani therefore sought to render modern narratives with the visual languages of historical periods thereby conflating legend, history and contemporaneity. To explicate this process, this article engages in a detailed analysis of three monumental relief murals created by Ghani in the latter half of the twentieth century for public buildings in Baghdad.