Meridel Rubenstein

Ehmad and His Boat, Central Marshes

Photographs on linen

From the series "Eden in Iraq."

"These photoworks are made from my scanned large and medium-format negatives, of the legendary Mesopotamian marshes in southern Iraq where land and people, after near destruction, are regreening their land and rebuilding their culture.

They have been printed both as smaller paper prints and in exhibition large on linen, tapestry, and metal. The large work was fabricated with University funding. I begin with camera negatives that are 5 x7inches, 6x7cm, and some digital files. I scan these and then work digitally. I make the more complex composites on the computer and translate them for the different media.

The Marsh Arabs developed their way of life around the resources of the marsh, once the third largest wetlands in the world- before being malevolently drained by Saddam Hussein in the 1990’s. Upon the dictator’s demise in 2003, the Marsh Arabs returned to restore their land."

– Meridel Rubenstein

About the artist

Meridel Rubenstein

Meridel Rubenstein has evolved from photographer of single photographic images to artist of extended photographic works, multi-media installations, and social practice that focuses on intersections of nature and culture in relationship to ecological and social imbalance.

In 2019, she returned to her New Mexico studio after teaching, as Visiting Associate Professor, at the the School of Art, Design, and Media, at Nanyang Technological University(NTU) in Singapore, where she taught Extended Photography as well as Art and Ecology(2007-18). She is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Sustainability, at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona(2015-). Meridel has maintained her art studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, producing art projects and exhibitions, both solo and in collaboration.

Her three-part series, titled Eden Turned on Its Side, opened at the University of New Mexico Museum of Art in early 2018 as well as at the National Design Centre in Singapore(late 2017) Her monograph, Eden Turned on Its Side, was released on February 3rd, 2018, coinciding with these two exhibitions.

Rubenstein initiated and is Project Director for the Eden in Iraq Wastewater Garden Project. This interdisciplinary water remediation project in the wetlands of Southern Iraq, using environmental engineering, art, design, and wastewater to make a restorative garden for health, cultural heritage, and environmental education. These marshes are thought to be a possible site of the historic garden of Eden. Initially funded by a research grant from Nanyang Technological University(NTU) 2013-2017, in 2014 , it became an official project of the Iraqi NGO, Nature Iraq(www.edeniniraq.com). In 2020, it was designated by Unesco as one of 75 outstanding Green Citizen’s Projects.

She has exhibited internationally in numerous gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Louvre in Paris. Permanent collections that house her work, include the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany. She has received numerous grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship.

- Lucy R. Lippard, author of Undermining: A Wild RIde Through Land Use, Politics,and Art in the Changing West, has written:

Eden Turned on Its Side is a dazzling demonstration of the ways beauty (via inventive art and photography) can illuminate the earth's most crucial issues, offering hope for a different world than the one we are barging into.*

*Meridel Rubenstein, Eden Turned on its Side, University of New Mexico Art Museum and Press, 2017