saddam's babylon
"In the era of Saddam Hussein, protector of Iraq, who rebuilt civilization and rebuilt Babylon. SdH."
In 1982, Saddam Hussein began reconstructing Babylon's most imposing building, the 600-room palace of King Nebuchadnezzar II c. 586 B.C. Saddam rebuilt over the ancient city’s historic ruins. His plan outraged historians and archaeologists but they were powerless to prevent this desecration. For a wall at one of the swimming pools Saddam commissioned a mural based on a print of a painting by the English artist Stephen Pearson titled ‘The Wings of Love’.
The intention of this project is to explore two aspects of cultural weighting - Is how we perceive an object’s importance dependent on the environment within which it is viewed and why do certain populist artworks, dismissed by the art establishment, gain significance in the broader cultural sphere.
Review of Saddam's Babylon here