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One Fine Show: “Michael Rakowitz, Proxies for Poets and Palaces” at the Stavanger Art Museum

This show grapples with the complex and painful legacy of war, offering a pointed commentary on its lasting impact on both culture and memory.

Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.

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Few contemporary artists create work about war and its effects. This is somewhat strange, considering that in the past, war inspired all kinds of remarkable art, whether we’re talking about the counterculture works of the 1960s and 1970s or the Surrealism we’re all so obsessed with today, which was a response to the First World War. If you’re middle-aged, the United States has been at war for the majority of your life. It’s impossible that most working artists don’t have some opinion about those wars. Could it be as simple as the fact that people don’t want to buy art inspired by war? Consider the unintended symbolism of that time artist-turned-dealer Tony Shafrazi graffitied Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937).

The Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz (b. 1973) creates some of the most explicit art about war being made today. His new show at the Stavanger Art Museum, “Proxies for Poets and Palaces,” constitutes his first major survey in Norway and offers a strong overview of his practice at a time when American saber-rattling has turned in the unlikely direction of Europe.

At the center of the exhibition are eight reliefs conceived for the show as part of his ongoing series The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, which began in 2006 as an attempt to recreate the over 7,000 objects looted from Baghdad’s Iraq Museum in 2003 or otherwise destroyed at archaeological sites in the war-torn country. These new works take the form of eight wall reliefs made from cardboard, Arabic newspapers and food packaging.

The works are positioned to form a “room within a room,” which sounds grandiose, but these pieces are fragile. The fact that they are made from garbage is a key part of the series, touching on both general and specific tragedies that have come courtesy of the U.S. government. There’s a lineage implied by the recreation of these reliefs, with brightly colored labels meant to entice Iraqi families at the grocery store. It suggests a bid for nostalgia, but these reliefs emerged from humanity’s shared history, not a local one. It makes no sense for them to have been treated as refuse from a specific culture.

The exhibition also features older work by Rakowitz, including a film shown at his exhibition in Athens last year, The Ballad of Special Ops Cody (2017), in which a G.I. Joe-style toy explores the Mesopotamian stone figures in vitrines at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, finding a kind of commonality with them. As great as the title is, Rakowitz didn’t completely invent it: Special Ops Cody was a real toy sold on military bases in Kuwait and Iraq, made infamous when a combatant group posted a photo of a hostage it called John Adam. It was, in fact, just the doll, which accounts for why the supposed prisoner glares at the camera with an entitled ferocity. Troops on those bases were supposed to send these toys home to their kids as gifts.

“Michael Rakowitz: Proxies for Poets and Palaces” is on view at the Stavanger Art Museum through March 15, 2026.

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