Can art help rebuild a city? The answer may lie in Mosul.
In 2019, the Iraqi city, still scarred after years of ISIS occupation, welcomed the return of art to one of its prized cultural spaces – the Mosul Museum, where insurgents destroyed its collection of antiquities years earlier.
The exhibition Return to Mosul, developed by
Al-Ghad Radio, featured 90 paintings and sculptures by artists from Mosul and other parts of Iraq. It marked the city’s liberation and recovery, and acted as an expression of what people from Mosul, or Maslawis, had endured.
“Every painting has a story and a real person behind it. Some