Through her artwork, Mivan Makia presents a mixed-media work composed of manipulated analogue photography, found objects, and environmental matter, inspired from recent trips to Iraq.
Questioning the complex relationship between humans and the surrounding environment, Makia uses the territory’s fetishised ecological symbols – such as date palms, freshwater rivers, and crude oils – to narrate the reciprocal imprint between the people who operate, live and work in those environments and the environment itself. Objectifying and directly extracting matters from the stereotypical terrains of Iraq, the work shows a networked understanding of how plant histories, national mythologies, and political economies are intertwined.

Derived through a "process-cinema" method in which the land, people, and material involved in the project inform its making, most of the work has been shot on 120mm analog film and hand- processed at the artist's darkroom by using sustainable eco-friendly developers, made of plants, fruits, and flowers sourced from Iraq. Additionally, the work expounds on a history of the place by centralizing water as a point of origin about this human-made territory. Meanwhile the processed film questions the role of documentary media in the making of modern Iraq as early foreign oil companies used film, photography and cine-magazines to legitimize political acts of foreign exploitation of Iraqi oil, land and labour between 1951 to 1958.

By bringing these different elements together, the work parallels divergent histories of the place. Installed through a scenography similar to that found in the Iraq National Museum, the work reflects on Makia’s own role as an observer of artifacts and terrains about a place imagined and derived from environmental projections and ideas.