Born in 1982, Athier Mousawi lives and works between Paris, London, and Istanbul, and holds a graduate degree in Communication Design with Illustration from Central Saint Martins, UK. In recent years Athier Mousawi’s work has centred on posing unanswerable questions against undefined answers, forming a visual narrative between the two. Since 2007, the subject of much of his work has been Iraq and his diasporic relationship to his foreign homeland, as well as the concept of nostalgic referencing in how we idolise and remember our past, present, and future. Separate to his artistic practice, Athier has worked extensively as an educator in the UK and abroad. For three consecutive years, beginning in 2007, Athier worked as a British Museum Arab Artist in Residence, working in schools throughout the UK. In 2011, he was selected to serve as the Chasing Mirrors Artist in Residence at the National Portrait Gallery, leading workshops in community centres across London. Athier has also worked in a number of refugee camps as a workshop leader in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan, and in 2014 was invited by the Palestinian Museum as a Visiting Artist to conduct workshops with children in the West Bank. In 2015, he was selected to work at the artist-run interdisciplinary space Beirut Art Residency. Athier has participated in many solo and group exhibitions including in Beirut, Dubai, Geneva, London, Jeddah and Tashkent.

Biography Omar Al Shahabi was born in Iraq in 1983. He earned a BFA from the University of Baghdad in 2007 and now lives and works in Qatar. He has held solo…

Born in Baghdad in 1939, Dia Azzawi started his artistic career in 1964, after graduating from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. In 1969, Azzawi formed the New Vision group (al-Ru’yya al-Jadidah), uniting fellow artists prioritising the ideological and cultural aspects of art above any aesthetic premise.