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Art & Design

Jeremy Deller

The British artist's "It Is What It Is" exhibition drives a conversation about Iraq.

By Lauren Weinberg

WHAT “It Is What It Is,” an exhibition and series of dialogues on war-torn Iraq
WHEN Oct 10–Nov 15
WHERE Museum of Contemporary Art (220 E Chicago Ave, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org)

Jeremy Deller chose an unusual car to take on his road trip earlier this year: the burned-out hulk of a vehicle destroyed in a 2007 bombing in Baghdad, which killed 38 people and injured hundreds. The Turner Prize–winning English artist towed the car (pictured) across the U.S. for his exhibition “Jeremy Deller: It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq,” which the Museum of Contemporary Art hosts from October 10 to November 15.

Public-art nonprofit Creative Time organized Deller’s three-week road trip, which took the artist to cultural and educational institutions in New Orleans, St. Louis and other cities where his traveling companions—Iraqi translator Esam Pasha and Iraq War veteran Jonathan Harvey—shared their experiences with the public. While “It Is What It Is” is on view at the MCA, Chicago-based experts on Iraq will host daily discussions on the complex issues affecting the region.

Just how did Deller obtain the car? Interviewed by phone, he admits Dutch curator Robert Kluijver did the heavy lifting. “He had got the car already and used it in some art exhibitions,” Deller says. “It took him months to get it out. He must have people there on the ground, but it was a very complicated process with all sorts of legal problems…. He heard that we were trying to get a car out of Iraq and he said, ‘It’s going to be very, very difficult. You should just take the car that I have.’ So [it was] very simple.”

Deller feared that taking “It Is What It Is” on the road, between its stops at New York’s New Museum and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, would be more troublesome. “I was expecting that to be more confrontational,” he explains. “But I think the American public—well, the people we met, and we met people at random, really—were very interested in what we were doing. They weren’t angry.”

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