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Le Corbusier’s designs were revived after his death in the late ‘70s by the civil servant Sherine Mohammed Ali (who also features in Younis’ installation) and the building was completed in 1980. Younis’ installation comprises a model of the gymnasium and 3-D prints of seven female figures, whose images were developed from 3-D renders of photographs and archival materials found by Younis. Hung behind it is a frieze of framed images and text taken from architectural drawings, building reports, exhibition catalogues, magazines, diaries and interviews. They tell the stories of these women and of Baghdad’s urban development, chronologically from right to left. Among the featured women is Nada Zebouni, an architect who went from Baghdad to Paris for a summer internship at the office of Le Corbusier’s contractors. Two paintings by the artist Fahrelnissa Zeid, the Turkish wife of the Iraqi Prince Zeid who was exiled after the 1958 incidents, also feature in the frieze. Upon her settlement in Amman, ‘Zeid set up a womens art academy in Amman. Some of her students went on to open the city’s leading cultural institutions like Darat Al Funun,’ Younis explains. The cover of the first issue of Imara, an architecture journal that Maher published in 1982, appear alongside Sharara’s diaries. ‘I have met some of the women who appear in the work. They now live in London and Maher came to see the exhibition,’ says Younis. Towards the end of the timeline is architect Zaha Hadid’s lecture at Darat Al Funun in Amman in 1997, which Younis attended as an architecture student, and the revival of the discussion on Le Corbusier’s gymnasium by the architectural historian Caecila Pieri, who visited Iraq early after the 2003 US-led invasion. ‘Zaha did not have any projects in Iraq, yet she was so important for a generation of young architects in the Middle East, including myself,’ says Younis, ‘Her work on deconstruction in architecture mimics Baghdad’s own unravelling.’
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