Turning their attention to particularly laden spaces, Golkar and Younis have each produced projects that address the axis of power, history, and memory embedded in the architectures of the state, sports, and culture. Both artists borrow the raw materials of the archive to generate counter-legibilities. Within this tenuous space between the archive as intended and the archive recast, the stadium emerges as a site of fantasy, crisis, and desire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the 1950s, architects including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, and Gio Ponti (and, later, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown) were commissioned by the Iraq Development Board under the guidance of King Faisal II to \u201cmodernize\u201d Baghdad. The design of large-scale schemes from each Western-trained architect was initiated to promote a new Baghdad. Among these was a stadium designed by Le Corbusier as part of the city\u2019s unsuccessful bid for the 1960 Olympics. For the bid Le Corbusier designed a \u201cCity of Sport,\u201d including a stadium seating fifty thousand, an open-air amphitheatre, several courts for various sports, an Olympic-size swimming pool, wave pools, and extensive landscaping. \u201cThe site would change three times in the turmoil that followed at the close of the decade and beyond, and the scope of the masterplan would be serially reduced until all that remained was the gymnasium.\u201d^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Samuel Medina, \u201cPreservation Push for Obscure Le Corbusier Sports Complex in Iraq,\u201d Architizer Journal, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Golkar\u2019s series of sculptures titled Le Corbusier Derivatives<\/em> (2009 \u2013 13) are loosely based on the modernist architect\u2019s drawings for the Olympic Stadium in Baghdad (also referred to as the Baghdad Gymnasium and the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium), which were drafted between 1957 and 1965. Le Corbusier produced 950 drawings for the complex that includes the stadium, but the project remained dormant until long after his death. It wasn\u2019t until 1981, under the direction of Saddam Hussein, that the renderings materialized in built form. Their realization did not, however, adhere exactly to Le Corbusier\u2019s vision, marking the space as one designed through an uneasy collaboration between the architect and Hussein. Golkar\u2019s artist statement explains: \u201cWhat happened in the years following proved to be a perversion of the Modernist visionary\u2019s idealization of the Man, sports and Modernity itself.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Babak Golkar, artist statement accompanying Le Corbusier Derivatives, Studio Babak Golkar, artist\u2019s website.<\/span> By this Golkar means that in the late 1980s Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein\u2019s eldest son, was assigned the role of leading Iraq\u2019s Olympic Committee and its Soccer Federation. Throughout his term holding these positions, which lasted until his death in 2003, Uday used the Olympic Stadium to win trophies but also, notoriously, to torture and execute athletes, especially after the loss of an international match.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n