In Search of the Marshes: A Fish is Buried

From June 2022 to June 2023, artist Akeel Khreef will undertake monthly excursions across Iraq’s southern marshlands, where his family originates. The dying out of the Marshes highlights the emotional co-dependency of humans and non-humans in this fragile ecosystem. Using his own body as a barometer for climate change, he will focus on three key elements in the ecosystem: cane reeds, fish, and agriculture, to produce “field diaries” combining video footage and photography.

12. A Fish is Buried

In this final report from performance artist Akeel Khreef's 12-month journey across the marshlands of southern Iraq, through which the artist has engaged through artistic intervention in a multitude of environmental and social contexts brought about by climate change, Khreef travels to. Najaf to bury a fish from the Chibaish Marshes, killed by drought, at the Valley of Peace Cemetery.

This ritual was the outcome of the interviews the artist conducted with the inhabitants of the marshes who reported that when any living being dies–including a fish–as a result of the drying out of the marshlands, it is as if they lost a family member. The artist enacted this sadness through burying one of the fish in a cemetery whilst another funeral was taking place nearby.

Credits:
The idea: Artist Akeel Khreef.
Photography: Akeel Khreef, Salam Karim, Sherko Abbas and Iyad Nasiri.
Translation: Ahmed Al-Amshawi.
Edited by: Salam Karim

Akeel Khreef

Taking Iraq’s lack of ecological awareness in his sights, Akeel Khreef’s (b. 1979, Baghdad, Iraq) sculptural pieces are made out of material taken from discarded objects. Bits and pieces of a broken generator and an old bicycle, for example, are used to make chairs, in gestures of recycling that touch on an urgent need for raised consciousness with respect to the environment and limited natural resources. Outside of his artistic practice, Khreef runs regular workshops for young people in Baghdad on working creatively with found materials in order to instill a sense of ecological responsibility.

Commissioned by Ruya Foundation for World Weather Network; part of the weather station in Tigris River & Mesopotamian Marshes, Iraq - find out more here.