Ahmed Al Bahrani - Heavyweight creativity (Canvas - Art and culture from the Middle East and the Arab world, Volume 1 Issue 4, July and August 2005).

Standing in the middle of a building site with Ahmed Al Bahrani on a warm night in Doha, during the creation of his now famous Olympic ring sculpture, I realize that I have been holding my breath. Before us, and emerging from behind some scaffolding, is a 17-meter high iron sculpture of the Olympic rings. They stand precariously one atop the other, making loops and perching on an undulating sway of more metal. In the background, higher up the hill, are the outlines of the magnificent stadium that is under construction and which will host the 2006 Asian Games. I let out a long sigh.

When it’s done, it will be encased with stainless steel”, Al Bahrani interrupts the silence. “I didn’t want the Olympic rings to be colored the way they usually are. These will all be a shiny silver color.” He points to the bottom part of the sculpture. “That”, he says, “is a sea wave, representing the geographical location of Qatar.”

I advance a few steps and look more closely at the base of the piece. With only the beam from the car headlights to illuminate the darkness, it’s difficult to see clearly. I turn and look at Al Bahrani. How exactly, I ask him, do you make 20 tonnes of iron appear to float off the ground like this? He chuckles. “I want people to stop thinking of iron as something that is heavy and inflexible”, he tells me. “I want them to see that it is fluid, that it has movement and emotion in it.”

Later, I discover that Al Bahrani relishes working on such a large scale, and with material that challenges both his body and his creative spirit. He is aware that very few artists choose to sculpt with iron. “I’m not interested in working with materials that are easy to manipulate”, he says. “I love using iron, even if it is physically very demanding and takes a lot of time. I believe it’s only natural that sculpting should involve a good measure of manual labor.” 
Perhaps it is also only natural that Al Bahrani, who left his native lrak 12 years ago to avoid persecution and has yet to return, should seek to test himself against high odds. He is, after all, no stranger to difficulty.

Born in Babel in 1965, the young Al Bahrani used to mold figures out of the clay that lay on the banks of the Euphrates by his home. As a teenager, he dreamed of going to Baghdad to study at the Fine Arts Institute. “I knew that going to the big city to study was going to be a make or break situation for me, but I had my family’s support and I was determined to do it.” At 16, he was one of 3000 hopefuls to take the institute’s entrance exam and only one of 12 to get in. Even as a student, Al Bahrani knew that in order to remain true to himself as an artist he would have to keep defying what had become conventionally acceptable. He worked hard and received the approbation of his teachers, but soon discovered that he would have to move beyond what they had to offer him. “The great lraqi sculptor, lsmail Fattah, had a great influence on all of us and it would have been difficult for any emerging artist to stray far from his orbit”, Al Bahrani says. “One day, Fattah told me that he felt I had managed to escape his influence and that is when l felt l was really getting somewhere.”

Once he had completed art school and set out to make a name for himself in lraq, Al Bahrani realised that if he was going to make a living as an artist, he had only one of two choices: either to work under the tutelage of the regime and compromise his artistic freedom, or leave the country and try to make it independently. He chose the latter, knowing full well that it would not prove the easier choice. “We were being buried alive in lrak”, he says. “You couldn’t breathe without them knowing about it. Even our shadows were being watched by Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

He is reluctant to elaborate on the first year he spent away in Amman, saying only that it was much more difficult than he had imagined it would be. Al Bahrani went on to Yemen, then to Qatar and finally to Sweden, where his wife and children now live. At first, it was a question of trying to make enough money to feed and clothe his family. “lt was very difficult. In the beginning, people ran away when they saw my work, but I managed to find a public in the end. I believe it’s up to the artist to educate the public eye to take in new things and to appreciate them.”

There is no false modesty in Al Bahrani’s confidence. He says it is his strong conviction that he was doing what was right for him which eventually made people recognize his work. “lf you want to do really creative work as an abstract artist, you have to be prepared to suffer the consequences. People may not like your sculptures in the beginning. They may even label you as crazy, but you still have to go on with your role as an agent for change. You have to turn the negative into a positive.”

Changing the traditional symbols that the public is comfortable with and creating something new and unused does not necessarily mean denying one’s culture, Al Bahrani continues. "Local culture definitely affects my work, but art itself does not have a nationality. I respect my culture and want to preserve my heritage and feel that the symbols we have inherited from the past need to be employed in a universal way. I am very lucky because I have had the opportunity to travel a great deal and to be exposed to the work artists are doing beyond my own country.”

Since the early 1990s when he first left Baghdad, Al Bahrani has exhibited his sculptures around the region, including in Dubai, Lebanon and Yemen, among other countries, and his pieces have sold to private collectors around Europe, as well as in the United States and Japan. The commission to design the sculpture at the entrance to the Olympic Stadium in Qatar is an indication of how successful Al Bahrani has been in penetrating mainstream culture and in introducing a new perspective for abstract art in the region. He argues that art reflects the nature of a society and that the achievements of a civilization are measured by the work its artists produce.

That is why he never takes his work lightly, but spends a great deal of time before executing a sculpture, ruminating on an idea, working out how he can leave his individual mark on it. “Success is a big responsibility”, he says. “lf there is any piece in an exhibit that people don’t seem to enjoy, I go back and think about it, about Whether or not I can improve on it.”

Despite the ‘futuristic’ nature of Al Bahrani’s sculptures – he is determined to do work that will continue to appeal to the public years from now – there is also something very primitive about them. Perhaps it is in the rawness of the materials he chooses and in the almost familiar, pliable yet solid shapes he molds. Perhaps it is in the sheer size and weight of his endeavors, the physical effort they suggest, in the implication that here man has definitely triumphed over matter. Or is it that the sculptor manages to not only pull iron out of its rigid perception of itself, but also to push us forward, towards a purer vision of beauty and of our own understanding of it?

There is no denying the strength of Al Bahrani’s will and enthusiasm. He lives and breathes his art and says that he even dreams about it at night. He says there are no limits to his ambition and to his energy to keep on producing work and to exhibit it even further afield. He is also anxious to impart what he has learned to fellow Iraqi artists, those who did not have the opportunities he has had and had to practice their art within the narrow framework of an authoritarian state. “There has to be some way we can help artists who stayed in Iraq to regain the balance they lost because of the oppression they suffered, and to become familiar with a much wider artistic perspective.”

Al Bahrani plans to return home soon, one day. In the meantime, he says that nothing will stop him continuing to move forward and giving his very being to his art. “I leave nothing inside myself. I keep working, produce a piece and put it aside before moving on to the next one. And despite all that I’ve done so far, I feel I’ve still got a lot more to achieve.”