Mila Dolman

EXITIUM is a manifest, cast in ceramic form. It proclaims war. War against the destruction of memory, of culture, of history. War against oblivion. War declared and led by those forgotten in the layers of history, but by those to who we owe history – the ruins. EXITIUM is a manifest of those that cannot speak, so I shall speak for them.

In the relief, ancient monuments from the cradle of civilisation - Mesopotamia - and the heroes they commemorated are endowed with contemporary weaponry: modernised and instilled with life to lead the riot against their brutal eradication.

The surface of the relief contains examples of real graffiti found on the walls of destroyed Syrian cities: ‘Peace I miss you,’ ‘Stop war,’ and ‘МИН НЕТ’ (NO MINES) left by a Russian soldier-miner.

I invited my friends and followers to make contributions to what else can be written on the relief, thus adding cultural layers to my contemporary ruin. This is how words and phrases in Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and other languages appeared on its surface: the om sign, declarations of love, an advert about buying weapons and a poster about recruiting fighters, akin the ones from the First World War. The ceramic wall became interactive and public.

By merging contemporary elements with ancient Mesopotamian epos, I attempt to reawaken its heroes and remains from their watchful trance, to transport them in time, to give them the power to speak and to fight their destroyers on equal footing.

As we lose architectural and artistic heritage to the black-market, the devastating effects of terrorism, war, vandalism, and our own indifference – we lose our identity. EXITIUM, looking at the Ishtar Gate as one of its main creative beginnings, is dedicated to our incapability to preserve and honour our histories and cultures and the revenge thereof. It draws attention to the need for preservation of cultural heritage and offers the viewer an apprehension of a future, where destruction obliviates the possibility of memory (personal and collective), and thus, a total loss of identity.

1. The PARTIBUS was the first piece I attempted to create for the #RuinsRiot project.

2. Most of the tiles were broken during the transportation from the RCA Ceramics Department to my studio. 

3. After leaving the pieces untouched for almost two years, I collected the remaining ceramic tiles and assembled them back together. 

4. I mounted the tiles on Victorian wooden floorboards. The same boards that belonged to the age of exploration and colonisation, and to a time of burgeoning interest in archaeology.

5.The encounter of wood, that the feet of those who filled the collection of the British Museum with stolen artifacts may have stepped on, and my work, commenting on the sacrality of cultural heritage, has given the PARTIBUS its meaning.

Dimensions: Paws H54.5 x W174.5x D6 cm; Legs H51.5x W90 x D6; Snake H51 x W74.5 x D6; Face Beast H50.5 x W1.18 x D6; Face Man H50.5 x W106 x D6 cm.

As a child, I had an amazing Barbie doll. Her arms and legs could be bent, and she was part of a limited edition. I brought her over from Germany to the USSR at the time of complete deficiency. You could barely buy food, let alone toys. 

At school, we were staging a puppet show and the teacher cast my Barbie for the lead role of Snow White. I, however, was not given a part - another girl got to hold and be the voice of my doll. After the show, everyone wanted to hold my Barbie. She was returned to me with a broken leg. I felt like weeping...

Years after, the story of the broken leg became a part of my personal story. After a complex fracture and almost a year of rehabilitation, I still wasn't able to 'get back on my feet' completely. I was haunted by pain. Pain that led to nightmares, where everything merged into one: past and present, knowledge and memory, my childhood and my children, my art and the art of the ancients, which I study and find inspiration in.

In my consciousness, the Hittite mother-goddess from Hasanoglan, exists in close proximity to the LOL Doll - a popular new invention that dethroned Barbie herself. This curious neighbourship led to the creation of a new figure in the #RuinsRiot project that simultaneously alludes to ancient bronze sculpture and to contemporary pop symbols. My rendition of the LOL Doll comes with all the accessories she may need to lead a comfortable life, hidden inside a case that serves as her podium. Among them are weapons if war strikes; a crown and a Birkin bag for an outing; it even hosts her pet - a snake. These small details are all cast from bronze and covered with patina of different shades. 

The LOL Doll symbolises archaic feminism, pertinent to contemporary women, who have acquired masculinity without the loss of femininity. Photographs from the Second World War document the female inhabitants of the ghetto - unprotected and tormented. A dozen years later in Israel, we see a completely different image - confident women, dressed in uniform and holding machine guns. Yet, remaining elegant and sexy. 

This, at the first glance, unexpected juxtaposition dates 2000 years back. Ishtar, one of the most important goddesses in the Mesopotamian pantheon, was the patron of war and strife, fertility and carnal love, often combining androgynous features in her physical representations.

Three thousand years B.C., all the major deities of the neighbouring to Mesopotamia Elam were female. Among them, Pinikir, the mistress of heaven, who later became Elam’s main deity. Pinikir, unlike her Mesopotamian equivalent Ishtar – the goddess of war and love, who is often represented with androgynous features - was perceived as more feminine. She is cited as the patron of love, sex, and heavens.

I returned from my expedition to Susa, the centre of Elam’s nation-state, with many materials for the #RuinsRiot project, as well as two stripes on a pregnancy test. My trip to Iran led to an unexpected pause in the work on the project. I had to postpone my studies at the RCA, take a leave of absence and relocate to my home studio, where a small series of new characters and a new branch in the project came to life.

As I returned, the political tensions in Iran intensified. The media supplied disturbing news following the 2018 US withdrawal from the Nuclear program of Iran, the Persian Gulf crisis was commencing. Iranian air was ringing with potential war. For me, this meant to fear for the safety of the cultural heritage of this ancient country.

The Expectation Doll, a bronze sculpture, was the first in the series. Her headdress reads ‘protect.’ During that year, this word was consonant with my personal needs, and what cultural monuments require. I felt the importance of translating that sensation through the mimicking of a deity. When bringing a life into this world, we take on the functions of the creator. This feeling of a unique shift, physical and mental, undoubtedly affected my artistic practice.

Along with the bronze sculpture, a series of ceramic vases came to be part of the Expectation Series. One of them is the Selfie Vase; it is inscribed with poetry from Mesopotamian epos and depicts a female deity taking a selfie. Me ‘trying on’ the character of the sun goddess further resulted in a series of photographs, in which I, as an artist, take on the role of the model.

In ancient Elam sculpture, emphasis is given to the hands supporting the breasts – the primary source of nurture. Voluptuous forms of all the unearthed figurines allude to the idea of fertility and to the idea of the nonviolent treatment of one’s body, a body that can give life.

For me, the heroes of the Expectation Series came to be a vital part of the larger #RuinsRiot project, and a step towards further exploration of the themes of protection, feminism, and the bodily.

Intended as a total installation, #RuinsRiot invites its visitors into a museum of non-existing realities filled with imaginary artifacts. Among them, is the main and the most cited hero of the project – Mushkhushshu, a mythical hybrid with the scaly body of a dragon, the paws of a lion, and the talons of an eagle, a unicorn’s horn, and a snake for a tail. According to the religion of ancient Sumer, Mushkhushshu was the sacred animal of the god Marduk, the patron deity of the city of Babylon.

The figure of Mushkhushshu appears on the Ishtar Gate as a repeating relief. I took his image and sculpted it in three-dimensional form, naming him the Beast for simplicity. In my imagined museum, his sculpture is part of the visitor’s route across the exhibition hall: frozen and tastefully lit, like so many artifacts looted from their countries of origin, on display in every European museum.

The Beast, now emerging beyond the form of a relief, becomes a full-bodied entity. He may seem immobilized by his museum setting, however, he is ready to leap into action, to answer the call of his master Marduk and to join the battle against those, who want to destroy their legacy. Far from being paralysed, he presides over this imagined museum and is ready to lead the riot against the ideology of indifference.

Mushkhushshu, presiding over my imagined museum, is omnipresent in it. His eyes are everywhere, his image is scattered all over the room, becoming flesh in the sculpture of him, gazing upon the visitor from the relief. The image of him multiplies in the smaller sculptures - the Beasties - phantasmagorical and inescapable. Just like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus anthropomorphised by Walter Benjamin, they are endowed by their knowledge of time, they see one single catastrophe, where we see only a chain of events. Dressed in bright colours and splashes of contemporary art, the Beasties await, patiently, still living history, ready to leap into action, to make whole what has been destroyed.

Archaeological processes, such as excavation, reconstruction, and documentation of ancient material culture, are methods that I consciously referred to during the creation of the #RuinsRiot project. To mimic the process of how an artifact would be treated by an archaeologist was integral for me to construct my modern ruins, where I am the one unearthing and studying them.

At the age when the remains of the ancient civilisations became the subject of increased interest, the most vital piece of an archaeologist’s kit was the sketchbook. Carefully documented images of discovered objects filled page after page, transcribing every detail with meticulous precision.

Nonetheless, no matter how accurate a representation of the object, it remains a reproduction. A translation made through the eyes of an individual disconnected in time, space, and understanding from the original meaning of the object they have come into contact with.

Archaeology, as a science, is a quest for meaning. The said meaning can belong to the object, it can be assigned, or even imposed. Thus, the object is always altered and transfigured through interpretation.

In documenting my ruins by the means of etching, I both allude to the archaeological sketchbook as a tool of recording knowledge, and, simultaneously, dictate their meaning. Purposefully adding contemporary details - machine guns, sneakers - to the recognisable form of the ruin and images appropriated from Mesopotamian epos and artistic activity, I alter their narrative, layering it with today’s history.

The Meta-Tapestry continues the conscious excavation and reconstruction processes I am performing in the #RuinsRiot project through the use of ancient materials and techniques. Ancient Mesopotamia was culturally defined by the art of weaving, and the magnificence of Babylonian and Assyrian tapestries was unanimously proclaimed by the writers of antiquity.

Like all the other works in the project, the Meta-Tapestry incorporates elements of contemporaneity’s material culture: a plastic construction mesh serves as a canvas for the delicate threads. The juxtaposition of the materials has brought the tapestry into its ‘meta’ state, taking it beyond the status of a textile: it serves as a commentary on the need to take care of ancient monuments through restoration, as well as turns the textile into a shield, one can wrap around ruins to use as a protective layer without touching them.

History presents us with many riddles and puzzles to which we cannot always find an answer or an explanation. During the work on the #RuinsRiot project, a series of reliefs came to being. As I arranged and rearranged tiles, scattered all over my studio, I found surprising harmony and accordance between pieces that belonged to different parts of the large EXITIUM relief when accidentally placed together. The unique patterns of my imagined artifact, formed through each new combination, made me think of the puzzle of history and the archive – how it shapes our relationship with the past and affects the construction of historical meaning. Who defines it? How does its definition affect the conditions that enable the history to be written? And what role do accidental or inexplicable collisions play?

In its totality, #RuinsRiot is a staged museum. What follows the rows of halls and every exhibition in any museum in the world? The gift shop, filled with a paraphernalia of items with the reproductions of what one just saw across the rooms of the museum. Pencils, notepads, t-shirts, and toys - ready to be purchased and taken home. The memory of the visit immediately fades, commercialised and capitalised. Art, undergoing the process of mechanical reproduction, is devalued of its uniqueness. The ideas relayed by the careful curation of the artwork, or the larger issues with the provenance or history of the exhibition pieces, are immediately forgotten, as one passes through the shop and back to personal realities.

For my imagined museum, I have also decided to create a gift shop – as a conscious emphasis on it being a museum, as an institutional critique, as well as the critique of the mass treatment of important issues, that go beyond the individual.

Mushkhushshu, the main hero of my project, a fierce mythical war beast, transforms into a plush toy, now easily found within the museum’s gift shop. His tag explains his mission for those that will take him home: ‘to study ancient history and wonderful secrets long forgotten, so we can protect the world’s heritage together.’ In this way, the commercialisation of Mushkhushshu, is an attempt to kindle an interest in the knowledge about ancient cultural monuments, as knowledge and memory are powerful tools in the fight against oblivion. 10% from the sale of every toy is also to be donated to UNESCO, to fuel the action against the destruction of ancient heritage.

Among other items available for purchase from the #RuinsRiot gift shop are customised ceramic chamomile flowers, tote bags with photographs from my studio, t-shirts with etchings. As in any shop, the range of items changes as the project changes in time.