Welcome to Iraq
Curated by David Horvitz
Venice, California
29 May 2026

Presented in Venice, California, at a gas station, the Iraq Pavilion is an offsite location of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Conceived by Ali Eyal and David Horvitz, the exhibition takes the form of a temporary roadside fuel stand, drawing from the informal economies of postwar Iraq, where bootleg gasoline is frequently sold through unlicensed petrol stations and improvised roadside vendors operating along highways and city streets.

Continuing his engagement with childhood memories of Iraq, Eyal transforms the logic of fuel distribution into a system for circulating images. Standing on the sidewalk beside the gas station, the artist will sell gasoline: drawings on and within used plastic bottles. The gasoline will be available directly from the street until sold out, collapsing distinctions between commodity, survival, painting and transaction.

The exhibition reflects on the afterlives of war, extraction and circulation, tracing a line between the oil economies of Iraq, the geopolitical tensions of the present moment in Iran, and the everyday fuel consumption of the United States. Iraqi oil has long entered global energy markets that sustain American infrastructure and daily life, even as the human consequences of war and extraction remain unevenly distributed and often invisible. Here, the bottle becomes both container and image: a portable monument to petroleum, migration, improvisation and exchange.

Installed in the open air a few miles from the Pacific Ocean beside the continuous movement of cars, traffic and consumption, the Pavilion proposes an exhibition format inseparable from the conditions it describes. Part sculpture, part performance, part informal market, the work exists within the unstable territory between art object and necessity, asking what forms of value can circulate through systems shaped by conflict, displacement and fuel.