As a child growing up in the Iraqi diaspora, Abdul Hadi’s visual imagination of Iraq was largely influenced by books in her family’s home library—one of these was Young and Wheeler’s Return to the Marshes. The Marshes, or Al Ahwar in Arabic, is a wetland area located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what was once the centre of ancient Mesopotamia. As few photographs of the Marshes were published at that time, Young and Wheeler’s images circulated widely, and continue to do so to this day. 

 In visiting and re-documenting the marshlands in the current day, Abdul Hadi captures the contemporary environment, where the local inhabitants, the Ahwaris, still follow the same way of life: living by the land, raising buffalo, and building homes using native plants. Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes asks the question, “Can histories be colonized even in imagination?”, opening a conversation about historic and contemporary photographic representation.

Presented by the Doris McCarthy Gallery as part of the 2024/2025 Jackman Humanities Institute Artist-in-Residence program, in partnership with Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Department of Historical & Cultural Studies and Department of Arts, Culture & Media, U of T Scarborough.

• Tamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer whose work is concerned with the historic and contemporary representation of her own culture, in its diversity. Along with being a photographer, Abdul Hadi is an educator who has taught in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, the UAE, Kuwait, Tunisia, and Canada. Her work has been published extensively in mainstream media, though she now prefers to work for more independent entities. Her photography and commentary focus on the dispossessed and marginalized, the underside of Orientalist representations, the underground of settler societies, and the changing social and environmental landscapes of the Middle East.