Untitled, 2025

59 drawings on paper, acrylic, wall charcoal text
Each paper, approx: 30 × 41.9 cm
1 framed drawing: 39.5 × 52 × 3.5 cm

Ali Eyal’s work is closely tied to the personal and collective experiences of Iraqis in the early 2000s, when the country was invaded by the United States and its allies. Often personal in nature and frequently incorporating family members as characters within his visual narratives, Eyal creates intricate compositions in which figures scatter, melt, and merge, producing imagery that gradually reveals itself to the viewer.

First presented at the 14th Mercosul Biennial, this installation is based on a real-life story that shifts into the story of Eyal’s cousin. As written on the wall in Arabic, his cousin Hissam was drawing a portrait of a warlord across his father’s fields—not out of faith in the image itself, but in its potential to protect his family by signaling loyalty amid the surrounding conflicts. As the portrait neared completion, word of Hissam’s actions reached armed men. Soon after, he disappeared, leaving behind only his footprints.

To accompany this story, Eyal has drawn his cousin’s feet and framed them low to the ground. Nearby, resting on wooden pallets across the floor, are fifty-eight portraits of politicians and military leaders responsible for the war in Iraq. Together, these works stage a confrontation between the personal and the political. As is characteristic of his practice, the portraits are actually “half-portraits,” avoiding clear depictions of faces—here erased by Hissam’s footprints. The footprints, symbols of both absence and persistence, visually and conceptually overwrite the faces of those in power. Absence thus becomes central to the work, evoking the countless men from Iraq’s civilian population who disappeared without a trace during dictatorship and war.