The Cessation — Al-Takwir, The Folding Up calls attention to the uninvestigated assassinations of prominent Iraqi women following the 2003 U.S.-led war in Iraq. First installed on the rooftop of Artpace in San Antonio, the work uses neon’s reduced line and urban visual language to think through the disappearance of Iraqi women from public space.

The silhouetted neon figure recalls Kahramana, the iconic fountain by the late Iraqi sculptor Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, situated in a Baghdad traffic circle. In the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Kahramana survives through vigilance and decisive action. Alshaibi’s installation reimagines Hikmat’s public monument as a deconstructed postwar fountain, transforming this symbol of feminine intelligence and survival into a civic counterpoint to absence.

Words carved into vessels were extracted from compiled data reports referencing the murder of Iraq’s intelligentsia class, including terms such as “Scrubbed,” “Shot Dead,” “Ambushed,” “Disappeared,” “Unknown,” and “She Was.” These words register the violence of the record itself: how lives are reduced to fragments, categories, and unresolved entries. Set among palm fronds, water, terracotta, copper, sound, and neon, the installation composes a lexicon of absence in response to the failure of the Iraqi state to address the devastating effects of war on Iraqi women and girls.

The Cessation opened a new direction in Alshaibi’s research, shifting attention from the performed body to public space, non-literary texts, data, and the material language of civic absence.

The Cessation — Al-Takwir, The Folding Up
2019
Neon, aluminum, acrylic, palm fronds, water, copper, terracotta, and sound
Dimensions variable

Originally commissioned and produced by Artpace San Antonio.

First installed on the rooftop of Artpace, San Antonio, Texas, 2019; later presented as part of the State of the Art 2020 traveling exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Collection of ASU Art Museum; installation view at the museum entrance.