Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1958 Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq

Year of Migration to the UK: 2008

Other name/s: Hanaa Mal-Allah, Hannah Malallah, Hana Malallah

Biography

Artist and academic, Hanaa Malallah was born in the Dhi Qar Governorate (also known as Thi Qar), Iraq, in 1958. Aged five, she and her family moved to Baghdad. Here, she had a creative childhood, practicing embroidery with her mother and developing skills that would become useful later in her artistic career. Earning her Graphic Art Diploma at Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts under the mentorship of Shakir Hassan Al Said and Faik Hassan, artists who were instrumental in bringing western modernism to the country, she gained a Bachelor's degree in painting at Baghdad's Academy of Fine Arts in 1988, followed by a Master's degree in painting in 2000 and a Doctorate in painting philosophy in 2001 from the University of Baghdad, where she wrote her thesis on the Logic Order in Ancient Mesopotamian Painting. In the 1990s, she began lecturing at the Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad, later becoming director of the Graphics Department, a position she held until 2006. However, that year Malallah was forced to flee Iraq after receiving threats from a fundamentalist militia group, which considered her a blasphemous figure as a female professor of art.

Malallah first immigrated to Paris, France, where she took up an artist's residency at the Institut du Monde Arabe. In 2008 she relocated again when she was awarded a fellowship by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). Here, she completed a postgraduate programme in Islamic and Modern Art. Malallah then received a fellowship from Chelsea College of Art (part of UAL, University of the Arts London) where she remained for three years. Reflecting on her time in London, Malallah declared: ‘London is a special city, and for that reason it is like Baghdad to me […] My artwork has developed greatly here. Some people say I am in exile in London but I am not – I have flourished here. Maybe this is because it is a global city and maybe because it is the centre of the art world. I feel it is a great opportunity to be here and this motivates me,’ (Asfahani, 2016).

Malallah’s oeuvre consists of mixed-media pieces that engage with political and social themes, especially war, where technique and materials often reflect the message. In works such as Illuminated Ruins (2013) and A Moment of Light (2015), Malallah uses a self-developed ‘ruins technique’. This method originated from the lack of readily available art materials in Iraq from the 1980s, which left Malallah and her colleagues with no choice but to use non-traditional found materials: splintered wood, bullet cases, barbed wire, and virtually anything damaged by war. This inspired Malallah to begin damaging and burning her own materials, such as cloth and canvas, to construct her art and to create different colours and textures. Discussing her experiences of war, Malallah stated that ruination highlights the existence of physical structures as symbols, rather than simply as realistic architectural bodies. She 'has tried to think through destruction as an essential part of the human condition, by treating the material she works with as found objects that she mutilates or disfigures [...]' (email correspondence between Malallah and Ben Uri, 2024). In her current practice, Malallah often uses the very material of her work to announce her subject of critique. For example, her public installation Biohazard Air Sculpture(2016), a balloon-like sculpture made of industrial plastic that hovered above Beirut's Saneyeh Park and shaped like the biohazard symbol, was made of potential waste product plastic printed with the logos of multi-national companies, emphasising the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and waste production. Malallah also started exploring the idea of 'virtual' dimensions of destruction and the intersections of spiritualism and technology.

Malallah regularly exhibits in the UK and internationally. Her UK exhibitions include Vivid Ruins at The Mosaic Rooms, London (2009), and Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11 at the Imperial War Museum, London (2017). In 2019, her artworks featured in Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art at the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. This exhibition explored the profound influence of migrant artists on British art over the past century and a half. It traced the journey and challenges faced by artists fleeing conflicts from the Franco-Prussian War to present-day crises in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, highlighting the role of émigrés from Eastern and Central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and their impact on their British counterparts. Malallah's works were displayed alongside those of iconic painters, such as Piet Mondrian, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Kurt Schwitters, whose work she admires and by whom she has been influenced.

Hanaa Malallah is currently based between London and Manama, Bahrain, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at the Royal University for Women. In the UK public domain her works are held by the British Museum in London.

Related books

Hanaa Malallah, Hanaa Malallah: 5.50.1.1.40.1.30.1.30.30.5. (London: Struktur Editions, 2018)
Joe Start and Nada M Shabout, From Figuration to Abstraction: Hanaa Malallah (London: The Park Gallery, 2017)
Alan Ingram, Iraq: How, Where, for Whom? Hanaa Malallah and kennardphillips (London: A.M. Qattan Foundation, 2012)
Charles Pocock, Art in Iraq Today (Milan: Skira, 2011)
Hanaa Malallah, 'Sophisticated Ways in the Destruction of an Ancient City', Qui Parle, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2009, pp. 103-108
Nada M Shabout, Dafatir: Contemporary Iraqi Book Art (Denton: University of North Texas School of Visual Arts, 2007)
Venetia Porter, Word into Art: Artists of the Modern Middle East (London: The British Museum Press, 2006), p. 148

Public collections

British Museum

Related organisations

Chelsea College of Art (fellow)
School of Oriental and African Studies (student and fellow)

Selected exhibitions

Remnants at The Cube (solo exhibition), ASC Studios, Croydon (2023)
Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine (group show), Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, USA (2023)
The 2Rs: Ruins and Rubble (solo exhibition), Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, Jordan (2022)
Co-Existent Ruins (solo exhibition), Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London (2022)
Rising Above The Storm On A Kite (solo exhibition), Park Gallery, London (2021)
She/He Has No Picture (solo exhibition), Park Gallery, London (2021)
She/He Has No Picture (solo exhibition), Park Gallery, London (2021)
Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art (group show), Royal West of England Academy, Bristol (2019)
Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011 (group show), MoMA, New York (2019)
Age of Terror: Art since 9/11 (group show), Imperial War Museum, London (2017-18)
Thread of Light (group show), P21 Gallery, London (2017)
Iraq: How, Where, for Whom? with Kennardphillips (group show), Qattan Foundation/The Mosaic Rooms, London (2012)
Vivid Ruins (solo exhibition), The Mosaic Rooms/Qattan Foundation, London (2009)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Hanaa Malallah]