Panel Discussion: Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes

Tamara Abdul Hadi, Anjali Nath, and Omar Sirri provide insight into Abdul Hadi’s ongoing project Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes, the development of her exhibition in the Instructional Centre Vitrines, and her work as Jackman Humanities Institute Artist-in-Residence. The program will feature a special guest presentation by Mustafa Hashem, an Ahwari activist from the Maysan province in Iraq.

This program is free and will be delivered in-person in the Instructional Centre Atrium at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Spaces limited; registration required. Please note any accommodation needs when registering or by contacting , and gallery staff will follow up with you as necessary.

The Instructional Centre is wheelchair accessible, and this is a seated program. Refreshments will be served.

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ABOUT THE PANELLISTS

Tamara Abdul Hadi is an Iraqi photographer whose work is concerned with the historic and contemporary representation of her own culture, in its diversity. 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.

Anjali Nath is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her work focuses on the visual culture of American militarism, with a focus on document redaction, transparency, and the archives of state violence. Her current book project, A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War, is a critical reckoning with the racial and imperial work of paper as mobilized in the service of American militarism.

Omar Sirri is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto. His current book project, tentatively titled Circulating the State: An Ethnography of Checkpoints in Contemporary Baghdad, explores how infrastructures of security in Iraq's capital city work to produce the state, even amidst persistent security breakdowns and failures.

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ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

This program is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes (August 28, 2024 - May 11, 2025), featuring work by Tamara Abdul Hadi in the Instructional Centre Vitrines at U of T Scarborough. A response to the 1977 photo-book by British journalists Gavin Young and Nik Wheeler, Return to the Marshes, which presented an image of the Southern Iraqi Marshes through the imperial camera of the nineteenth century, Abdul Hadi is now revisiting and photographing the Southern Iraqi Marshes anew to ask, “can histories be colonized even in imagination?” Re-Imagining Return to the Marshes is presented by the Doris McCarthy Gallery as part of the 2024-2025 Jackman Humanities Institute Artist-in-Residence program, in partnership with the Department of Historical & Cultural Studies and Department of Arts, Culture & Media, U of T Scarborough.

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Image courtesy of Tamara Abdul Hadi

Host or Publisher Doris McCarthy Gallery