For artist Rabab Ghazoul Widelode were asked to help with the production of her performance-installation for the G39 exhibition On Leaving And Arriving .
The piece deals with the artist’s relationship to her homeland Iraq , and is a response to the growing culture of ‘public mourning’ that, in the wake of September 11th, would seem to make visible – and therefore ‘grievable’ – certain deaths, whilst overlooking others. The artist attempts to learn a lament, a broken, faltering lament, articulating in the act’s artifice the notion that our grief is coerced and ‘learned’. The piece is also the artist’s own gesture of mourning for a homeland she herself would no longer recognize. An installation, video and sonic work, the piece housed in a shipping container in Cardiff city centre.