Iraq's ancient, looted treasures to be displayed in Venice

The Iraq Museum of Baghdad is to display 40 ancient artefacts at the Venice Biennale art exhibition this year, including several that were recently returned after they were looted in 2003, a media report said on Tuesday.

The National Pavilion of Iraq's exhibition, titled "Archaic", staged at the 57th Venice Biennale in May, will be the first time all the objects have been legally allowed out of the country, the Guardian daily reported.

Ancient clay pots, medical objects, musical instruments and figurines of deities and animals will be among the items on display, some of which date back to 6,100 B.C.

It will be the first time since 1988 that permission has been granted for anything from the museum's collection to leave Iraq.

The museum reopened in 2015 after being closed for 12 years while the stolen and smuggled objects taken during the invasion of Iraq were recovered.

The display in the National Pavilion of Iraq at the Venice biennale will be in direct response to what co-curator Tamara Chalabi describes as the "cultural genocide" at the hands of Islamic State (IS) terror group across Iraq and Syria.

"It is more important than ever that people outside of Iraq see these objects and understand their cultural significance, at a time when they are being nihilistically destroyed in Palmyra, in Nimrud, in Mosul," the daily quoted Chalabi as saying.

"These objects do have a universality that transcends geography...It fights a cultural prejudice people have and the perception that there is no art now left in Iraq or nothing left worth saving."

For Chalabi, it was important to include a few of the 15,000 objects which were looted from the museum's collection in the aftermath of the fall of late President Saddam Hussein, a third of which have subsequently been returned.

Among the recovered objects to go on display in Venice are a small weight measure shaped like a dove and a clay figurine of a fertility goddess.

Both were returned to the museum from the Netherlands in 2010.

--IANS

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