A new photo and essay dispatch from Kevin Sites (blogger and NBC News correspondent currently stationed in northern Iraq) about an artist named Wisam Rady — former propagandist for the Ministry of Information under Saddam Hussein. Excerpt:
Wisam is 36 years old, but still lives at home with his parents in Ath Thawra or Sader City. Partly he says it's because his family is so close. His mother still waits outside the gate for him to come home at night. But it also has to do with prison. His time at Abu Graib deeply wounded him, he says; his loss of time and place, which perhaps only home, only the familiar, can heal. It seems strange that healing can be done here, a city so strewn with garbage that goats feast along the median strip, among the passing traffic. It is also, the inspiration for the rats on Saddam's shoulders.
"There were no rats in Ath Thawra," Wisam says, "And then one morning we awoke and the city was infested with them. "It was a scheme by Saddam to make the people sick." Or so the people of the city believe. Wisam says he first did the Saddam paintings for his own catharsis. He shot a digital picture of the television video and turned reality into artistic realism. When he added the rats, the work somehow transcended the painterly necessities of so many Iraqi artists who knock out quick commissions on popular contemporary motifs. Now the work was more than just a colored mirror of a current event. Now the work found an audience. Local newspapers began doing stories on Wisam. American Army officers and western journalist began buying the paintings at $100 a pop. A steal, by Soho standards, but a good price in post-war Iraq.
