The dead of Iraq

In the early 1980s, Athena Tacha created drawings and models for architectural monuments intended for "Monuments of Massacres," dedicated to events that marked modern history. The drawings, which belong to the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, concern: 1) The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Monument, 2) The Holocaust Memorial, 3) The Central America Monument, and 4) The India-Pakistan Monument. These proposals, realised in 1983 but never implemented, aim to commemorate the victims of these tragedies and attempt to heal their wounds by keeping their memory alive. Her goal is to provoke the viewer's memory through physical experience and by creating a personal journey within the monument's forms. This entire approach showcases how the sculptor perceives her art in the public domain and how she desires to make it accessible to everyone, not just to a cultural elite who may visit museums or acquire it. In the 2000s, more than 20 years after the first drawings and models, he created the work "The Dead of Iraq", which she considers a continuation of the Monuments of Slaughter. Using the map of Iraq as a base and placing small red glossy beads on almost the entire map of the country, except for a few small areas, she attempts to visualize the blood of Iraqis as a flow of blood.