‘Templates for Liberation’ is Rheim Alkadhi’s first UK solo exhibition, addressing the ongoing consequences of war and colonialism in present-day Iraq and the region at large. Showcasing sculptures fabricated from the heavy-duty transport tarpaulins of cross-border industrial vehicles, extensive archival documentation and research in a dedicated reading room, and emancipatory counter-histories.

The exhibition design features expansive sign-painted titling, mounted recycled text boards, and caption texts printed on a wax-like card, referencing the texture found on the tarpaulins. These sculptures bear the traces of their transnational passage, and so the material itself embodies the environmental and sociopolitical violence consuming the region.

The reading room is titled, ‘The Land of the People,’ and features content with a colonial context where place and people have been enclosed by colonial borders. Alkhadi’s research has been gathered together and mounted as individual gloss plates to hard-wearing archival board, then ring-bound directly to the reading room table. These are representations of critical documents, correspondence, and governmental agreements relate to the establishment of the modern-day political borders in Iraq, drawn by the British and French between 1916 and 1923.

The is also the presence of a speculative rebel element that emerges from inside the reading room materials, accompanied by related documents. Photographic portraits of these rebels imagine countless unrecorded insurgencies by nonconforming women, racialised and ethnic minorities, workers, communists, and others. The rebels exist outside of time, defy categorisation, and bring an anti-colonial strategy into the present.

A collage of contextual maps, books and blown-up documentation is formed through the use of strip shelving, where elements can sit over each other. Numbered pins help the visitor navigate this information and give the impression of an archive.

The exhibition interpretation is set in Isola, a contemporary interpretation of the once ubiquitous hot metal font, Venus Grotesk. Venus was often used as a cartographic typeface and is found on many of the records the Alkhadi presents in the reading room, as well as some of the Tarpaulin material. Its mixture of wide and tall letterforms give a sense of permanence.

Instead of a gallery guide, a postcard series featuring various portraits of the ‘rebels’ is available at the beginning of the exhibition. The reverse of the card features the artists statement on the current state of geopolitics in the Middle East, at the time of the exhibition run.