Michael Rakowitz with one of his three new commisions for the show, which is inspired by connections the artist sees between ancient Cypriot and Assyrian artefacts
Photo: Natalia Tsoukala. Courtesy Νeon, the Acropolis Museum and the artist
At the opening of Allspice: Michael Rakowitz and Ancient Cultures in Athens, the Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz stood on a podium, backlit by an illuminated Acropolis.
Half of the ancient Greek complex’s treasures are exhibited at the Acropolis Museum, where the exhibition is taking place, but many are missing—some controversially housed instead at the British Museum and other international institutions. Their absence evokes the damaged and looted Iraqi heritage Rakowitz so lovingly honours in his own work.
Speaking to the assembled crowd of art collectors, artists and other notables, Rakowitz said: “I feel at home here.”
Allspice is the first in a trilogy of exhibitions organised by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, the Acropolis Museum, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Athens and the Athens based non-profit organisation Neon that is unfolding between 2025 and 2026. It also marks the first time that the Acropolis Museum has presented work by a living artist.
For the show, 13 objects from the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Culture and one from the Thanos N. Zintilis Collection of Cypriot Antiquities have been brought together with 14 pieces by Rakowitz that bring to the fore ideas of lost heritage, memory and diasporic longings.
The exhibition includes selections from the artist’s ongoing series The invisible enemy should not exist, a project that aims to recreate each of the 7,000 artefacts from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad that were looted or destroyed during and after the US invasion. Rakowitz makes each object from this series with his team of studio assistants using materials such as cardboard, Middle Eastern food packaging, glue and museum labels.
One facet of this work featured in the exhibition are recreations, or what Rakowitz describes as “reappearances”, of reliefs from the Palace of Nimrud, which were destroyed by Isis in 2015. The reliefs, which depict guardian figures known as lamassu—winged creatures with human faces—have been reimagined by the artist in vibrant, colourful papier mache. Reliefs resembling black chasms displayed with archaeological captions summon the ghosts of objects excavated and removed by foreign powers in the 19th century as well as contemporary looting and destruction.