"I view my projects as performing a necessary disturbance or jolt in everyday experience that will maybe slowly change our relationship to a crisis or a problem."
- Michael Rakowitz -

Who knew that the journey of a truck full of dates could render in such poignant terms peoples lives and connections with Iraq? But these rarified khestawi dates, one of over a hundred cultivated varieties, as artist Michael Rakowitz claims, came from the Hilla region of Iraq and were therefore some of the finest on earth. They were the delicious subject of an engrossing slide presentation, though not really, forgive us, the “meat and potatoes” of our experience. We were in the home of Triple Base Gallery co-director, Joyce Grimm, and this was temporarily at least Michael’s Enemy Kitchen, a kind of social practice art based around cooking and eating as a group.

A glass of wine in hand, we were urged to join the group in the kitchen, where branded “Michael Rakowitz: Enemy Kitchen” aprons were donned, ours for the keeping, each emblazoned with the Iraqi flag. Michael’s family are Iraqi Jews and he was born in Brooklyn. Currently he teaches at Northwestern University, Chicago and was visiting the Bay Area as part of a residency at the Montalvo Art Center. This residency was under the umbrella of their “Iraq: Reframe,” an ambitious series of events, performances and talks sponsored by Montalvo and other organizations to explore "the significance of the current circumstances of Iraq in a global and historical context." The recipes we’d be preparing were inherited from the artist’s mother, and included amba and kubba bamia. One was a fresh salad, full of onion and peppers, similar to many Mediterranean salads. Another was a breaded meatball, boiled in broth, which also brought to mind hearty Hungarian meals. But why cook?

The humor of Enemy Kitchen is obvious and the diffusing of tensions implicit in food preparation is self-evident. But there’s more. Enemy Kitchen began as a kind of subversion, a subversion of the American popular media’s portrayal of the country of Iraq as an impersonal, almost video-game-like perpetual battlefield, dehumanizing and conducive to apathy. Enemy Kitchen is an attempt to kindle the imagination of participants to envision the quotidian lives, mostly marked by shared meals, of real people who pass down recipes and share stories. To this end, the overall project, we learned from the artist, has expanded into New York’s schools, where Rakowitz teaches children how to cook these recipes. Many of these children have relatives serving in the military in Iraq. Ultimately, the experience humanizes the mixture, the border of American and Iraqi cultures, through an experience rather than an argument, through eating rather than violence or images related to bloodshed.

Before returning to the kitchen to chop and mix, we were invited to watch a slide lecture in the living room. On a large screen Rakowitz shared a previous project centered on the aforementioned sweet Iraqi dates. We learned of the long history of cultivated dates in the region and of all forms of cultural dissemination from Mesopotamia, within present day Iraq. Brief history lessons were punctuated by the artist’s personal experiences, such as his meetings with Dr. Donny George, former President of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and Director General of the National Museum in Baghdad, who fled the country and recently took up residence in New York. We learned of Rakowitz’s research into his own family’s history and a business his grandfather had run in New York, one he now revived as a rather elaborate piece of social art.

Many of Rakowitz’s projects exist just as comfortably in the "real world” as they do in galleries or museums. In “Return,” for example, he has recreated his Iraqi grandfather’s import/export business. With the help of a grant from Creative Time in New York, Rakowitz rented a storefront in Brooklyn and proudly advertised the impending arrival of real Iraqi dates. The dates became proxies for Iraqi refugees and almost all Iraqi products, encountering hurdles, requiring bribes and ultimately “dying” on a road in the middle of the desert on their way to Syria. Their expiration was due mostly to time in the heat of the large truck in which they traveled. The death of the dates was a real tragedy, as we all found ourselves rooting for their survival and eventual sale to customers in Brooklyn, mostly Iraqi immigrants who in photographs seemed deeply touched by the almost absurd gesture of their eventual availability. Every Iraqi product seems treated with toxic-proof gloves by every checkpoint and uniformed authority figure. And those products that do make it to export ships in places like Lebanon are often falsely labeled as Lebanese, to avoid suspicion about the danger of their contents. The irony was not lost on the audience, considering the vital need of such exports’ safe and easy movement, and what this would do to boost the Iraqi economy in ways that would benefit everyday people and stabilize the political situation. Dates could be to Iraq what pistachios have been to Iran, wine to France or cigars to Cuba. But so long as the bombs continue to pop up at random, any package labeled Iraqi is effectively the same as poison. Again, the parallel with treatment of Iraqi refugees is implied, but never named.

Well, the food was delicious and the conversation topical and rich. Rakowitz inhabits a “cutting edge” of social practice that relies heavily on institutional support to exist at all. It’s egalitarian, sincere and intelligent and surprisingly resilient to charges of sentimentality or simplification. Enemy Kitchen does not provide so pat an answer as “it’s hard to fire a gun while cooking,” though that’s certainly part of what we took away. The success of Enemy Kitchen has more to do with Rakowitz’s savvy and intelligence, coupled with his empathy and desire to further an agenda of cross-cultural understanding, than with the volatile history embodied by his family’s journey and the current violence in Iraq. We can all hope to see more such “art with an agenda” supported and participated in by curious Americans with empty stomachs.

Co-written by Raman Frey & Kimberly Johansson