Hanaa Malallah

Hanaa Malallah (born 1958) is an Iraqi artist and educator living in London, England. Her surname also appears in English as Mal-Allah. She is noted for developing the technique called the Ruins Technique in which found objects are incorporated into artwork.

Life and career Hanaa Malallah was born in Theeqar, Iraq in 1958. She moved to Baghdad with her family when she was aged five years. Growing up in Baghdad, she experienced the multiple conflicts and revolutions that ravaged her country. These experiences had a major influence on her work.

She received a Diploma in Graphic Art from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad where she studied with Shakir Hassan Al Said, obtained a BA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad (1988), an MA in painting (2000) and a PhD in the philosophy of painting from the University of Baghdad (2001) with her thesis entitled, Logic Order in Ancient Mesopotamian Painting. She also holds a post-graduate certificate in Islamic and Modern Art from School of Oriental and African Studies, London University.

As a female artist and professor of art, working in Iraq in the 70s and 80s, she received a number of threats against her life. For this reason, she felt that she had no choice but to leave Iraq and accept a new life outside her native land. In 2006, she left Iraq to take up a fellowship in Paris. She ultimately settled in London from 2007. However, she has said that she feels spiritually depleted living outside Iraq.

Work Much of her work deals with themes around the "chaos of war" which she had experienced in Iraq. In an interview, the artist explains the philosophy behind the ruins technique:

Due to the disenfranchisement of Iraqi female artists after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many Iraqi women were subjugated to traditional gender roles and barred from being in spaces that they had once been the majority of-including art. Nonetheless, Hanaa has refused to gender her art despite much of her artwork being influenced by the chaos of the invasion. In Nusair's article she mentions that Malallah "argues that art has no gender, and its concern is the work and its aesthetics." Her belief in art being genderless is shown in her artwork titled She/He Has No Picture which she installed in 2019 in remembrance of those who died in a bombing of a Baghdad neighborhood.

In an interview with Ruba Asfahani, Malallah speaks about her abstract art techniques, which is also her signature that includes the numbers "5.50.1.1.40.1.30.30.5" Each of these numbers correspond to the arabic alphabet. Malallah mentions that these numbers of importance to her due to her knowledge corresponding with how the Mesopotamians wrote with shapes instead of letters, and how art can be understood through a logical order. In the interview, Malallah explains: "This has caused me to become much more sensitive to every line and every drop of paint in my work."

The arabic cultural magazine Qafila has described one of the elements of Malallah's work that make her art stand out as Matter. The author, Fada Sabeety, describes three of Malallah's artwork that uses this element along with the methods and techniques Malallah uses to represent it. One of the methods that represent Matter is the use of raw materials on a canvas, which is essential to many of Malallah's work. Three of these works which Sabeety mentions are "Illuminated ruins", "Study of a skull", and "Camouflage." The raw material in question is a white cloth that is burned for a specified period of time in order to achieve the black, brown, and beige colors. Al-Bahloly mentions that Malallah created the art image Iraq, New Map/US Map from this influence of chaos where she created a cartography of Iraq with pieces of scorched paper

Her work is represented in the British Museum's permanent collection and is also included in the collections of Jordan's Museum of Fine Arts in Amman, the Centre for Modern Art in Baghdad, the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharja. Ashes to Art: The Iraqi Phoenix, [Featuring Malallah and four other Iraqi artists living in exile], Curated by Peter Hastings Falk, Pomegranate Gallery, 2005 Iraq's Past Speaks to the Present, British Museum Sophisticated Ways: Destruction of an Ancient City [joint exhibition with Rashad Salim], 6 June – 6 September, Aya Art Gallery, London Iraqi Artists in Exile, [With 14 other notable Iraqi artists including Shakir Hasan Al Said and Dia Azzawi], Curated by Alan Schnitger, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, 1 November 2008 – 1 February 2009

Select list of notable artworks Codes and Signs, mixed media on canvas, 77 × 77 cm, 1998 Looting of a Baghdadi Manuscript, oil on wood, 8 × 97 cm, 2003 My Night 16–17.01.1991, 2012–2013 Arabesque III, 2013–2016 Three Red Roses, 2016

Select list of publications Iraq: How, Where, for Whom? by Hanaa Malallah, A.M. Qattan Foundation, 2012

Awards and recognition Malallah received a prize awarded by the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization.