THINGS FALL APART is a monumental 13,20-metre-long plaster relief. As a counterweight to the classical reliefs that flank the entrance to Kunsthal Charlottenborg, THINGS FALL APART offers fresh, constitutive representations – a radical offering for a new epoch.
In his familiar, sometimes ironic, sometimes humorous depictions, ihsan saad ihsan tahir directly destabilises dominant narratives, challenging rigid perceptions of identity and history.
Borrowing his title from Chinua Achebe’s anti-colonial novel of the same from 1958, tahir draws
on the book’s themes to reflect on his own Iraqi heritage. Following this anti-colonial tradition, he employs a fragmented narrative structure that also exists in contemporary Iraqi literature, which, shaped by a century of conflict, is marked by discontinuity and gaps that reflect war, trauma, memory and exile.
Like Achebe, tahir tries to make sense of the chaos that emerges when an old, colonial world order collapses.
The relief’s surface is engraved with a medley of references – logos from Iraqi imports, memes, rap lyrics, family portraits, classical paintings and handwritten notes – brought together to create new, associative meanings. tahir brings these contextual codes and encrypted visuals – typically circulated in the mass media – to sculptural form, telling stories of cross-cultural exchange, masculinity and diasporic displacement through a non-linear narrative.
