In the center of Baghdad’s Zawraa Park, Roze Muhammed begins her performance. With a red thread attached to a needle, the young artist sews a line onto a thick piece of cloth in front of her. The thick white cloth hangs between two tall trees by cords attached to its four corners. After sunset, it is illuminated by lights arranged high up on the trees’ branches. Roze and members of the audience walk around its two sides. As Roze stands on one side of the cloth and begins to push the red thread through it, the audience follows her hands and the needle, trying to understand what to do with the hanging cloth. They interrogate Roze with inquisitive glances, eager to know what her artwork is about. She invites them to discover, to take the needle and thread and start to sew with her, each working from their own side and perspective (fig. 1).A member of the audience takes the needle and pulls it through to the other side of the cloth, while Roze plays lightheartedly with the thread and speaks. “History cannot be written from one side, so the needle passes from one side to another, and only with the presence of another person can I sew the whole history.”1 With only the silhouette of the other person visible, Roze and the audience participants draw another story on the cloth. They are writing together, sewing their stories into the fabric with only the eyes of the other visible above it, with touch possible only through the cloth itself. From time to time the artist’s eyes encounter the participants, engaging in a dialogue without words, the needle talking for them.Roze is an Iraqi Kurdish artist. Like many of the younger generation of Kurds who grew up after 2003 in the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, she doesn’t speak Arabic, but she always has a translator to enable discussion with audiences after a new story is completed. With the trees holding the whole performance, the public is welcome to play and sew without the artist being there. They can make their own stories. Roze notes that most stories the Baghdad audience is curious about concern Suleymaniyyah, her city of origin. They want to know more about the Kurdish city. They want to cowrite or cosew it. They want to imagine their country, Iraq, to write their new intersected histories. A country that has been divided by decades of dictatorship and war but that the spirit of the new generation wants to reappropriate. This can start here also, in a park, in Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival, with a thread on their hands.Roze’s performance and artwork, Unseen Link, was displayed at Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival in Baghdad in November 2021. The festival, which changes location every year, took place in Zawraa Park for the first time in 2021. Twenty-two artists participated, among them nine who were also involved in augmented-reality artworks, an interactive exhibition achieved through the use of digital visual elements delivered via mobile phones, in the same park alongside the other artworks. Tarkib is a contemporary art collective, founded in 2015 as an independent artists group, its members coming from different fields: visual arts, performing arts, music, literature, film, interior design, architecture, graphic design, and photography.2 In June 2017 a new challenge was taken up as the collective moved into its own permanent home: Bait Tarkib, or Tarkib House. Tarkib House is one of Iraq’s first creative art centers dedicated to contemporary arts and provides Baghdadi youth and women with a safe haven to express their ideas through exhibitions, public performances, trainings, and workshops.This short article presents a review of the artworks of two female artists, Roze Muhammed and Lanah Haddad, displayed at the Tarkib festival, and a bit of my research about emerging Iraqi women artists. I found their creative presence at the festival and their empathetic interaction with the audience very telling about the emerging generation of Iraqi artists. Their participation and willingness to cowrite and cocreate new histories reveal much about their new visions for Iraqi art.Iraqi society has been shattered by decades of dictatorship, war, sanctions, occupation, and civil war. Iraqis have struggled to overcome the collective and often ongoing traumas of this history to shape new collective narratives. The young protagonists of the Tarkib arts collective seek to change the narrative about the city of Baghdad with the simple but powerful slogan “Baghdad is alive.” I remember these young artists in the streets of their city during the 2018 Baghdad Walk festival (also organized by Tarkib) saying, “If you search on Google, Baghdad appears to be the most dangerous city in the world, the city of the dead. But we need to tell other stories about Baghdad, and say to the whole world that Baghdad is alive.”The activities and labs organized by Tarkib advance the careers and creative processes of innovative emerging and midcareer artists. The festival unfolds as a space for gathering together in different labs in which diverse forms of thinking enhance the understanding of what art can be. It’s an invitation to engage. If the Baghdad Walk investigates and challenges visual, plastic, and environmental pollution through original artworks, Tarkib initiatives and their reclaiming of public spaces in a war-torn country must be understood in a context of social and political demands for radical change, widely and vividly expressed by youth in Iraqi cities all over the country (fig. 2).Tarkib artists have actively engaged in Baghdad’s own “Tahrir Square” (Liberation Square) protests, which began in 2011 as part of the regional Arab Spring, following its namesake’s pattern by setting up tents and supporting the sit-in with cultural and theater events. The idea behind the tents in the square was to reproduce the shape of a more just and beautiful country in a smaller size. The “active citizenry” of female and male Iraqi revolutionaries of all classes and age groups shows that the change they aspire to in the government, accused of corruption and chronic mismanagement, is already part of “the society’s sensibilities,” which are “a precondition for far-reaching democratic transformation” (Bayat 2015). Moreover, the standing by of Iraqi revolutionaries marks their willingness to remain in Iraq to rebuild their country, in contrast to the many Iraqi artists who live abroad. While struggling to make a living from art and having to rely on a primary job to be able to make art, Iraqi Tarkib artists enjoy the possibility of having workshops and scholarships in collaboration with European institutions and funds, affirming their intention to remain in Iraq and, as one of Tarkib’s artists, Zaid Saad, proclaimed, “put life” back into Baghdad.Roze’s first visit to Baghdad, in 2017, has become a graphic novel in which she depicts her impressions and fears as a young student and artist born in the much calmer region of Kurdish Iraq, in particular Suleymaniyyah.3A graduate of a fine arts program and a master’s student in graphic and illustration at the University of Suleymaniyyah, Roze in Unseen Link looks for a connection with the audience. “As it was my first time having a performance in Baghdad, I didn’t know what the public’s reaction would be. Indeed, people enjoyed and became part of my artwork. By threading the needle, they became active participants, performers, and so artists as well. The performance of the art is the connection.”The participatory artwork comes from the artist’s desire to let the people understand what contemporary art is, given that most people see or conceive of art only in its classical iteration. The artist’s concept is transmitted by audience participation, which becomes essential to the performance and not merely accessory or instrumental. “When we write history, we see just one side. When I start to sew the cloth, I have an idea of my final design, but I can’t continue on my own. I need a second person, a participant from the other side of the cloth, to finish my idea, to bag the needle. We can create a different idea, our shape, our text. All the surfaces will be like the line of the history because we read the two sides of the history cowritten or cosewn by us.” They go back and forth both between Roze and the audience and among audience members themselves, until they understand one another’s intentions. The artist steps back and observes: it is an exercise of deep listening to others and an exploration of “new relations between performative embodied practices and witnessing and the possibility for reparation” (Al-Adeeb 2016: 269). While they sew, the silhouettes in the dark hours are created by the illumination, and the artist shares her feeling about history: “an alternative historiography situated at the intersections of memory, trauma, and resistance” (273).Through engagement with the audience, Roze uses her artwork to investigate both the individual creative agency to act in writing history and how it can be transformed into collective agency, composed of people raised in very different sociopolitical-cultural-economic contexts, coming together to challenge the terms of existing historiography. Following the thread on her cloth, drawn/sewn along with the audience/participants, sheds light on the possibility of carefully listening to the specificity of one another’s stories of becoming storytellers and agents of history. The lines sewn into the cloths by the participants constitute a collection of firsthand vivid ethnographic accounts with which to write the microhistory of individual and collective trauma. Roze’s frequent reference to her presence in Baghdad as a non-Arabophone Kurd, the feeling of being welcomed, and attracting the curiosity of Baghdadi people recall the history of the Kurdish population in Baghdad and Iraq. Baghdad has always had a large Kurdish population integrated into the city, but since the 2003 split of the city into ethnic enclaves, this has been disrupted, and now a new generation of non-Arabic-speaking Kurds is moving or visiting Baghdad, creating a different dynamic. Roze’s intention of challenging the history written from one side leads us to think about the genocide of the Kurds perpetrated by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and 1990s, one of the most traumatic events of Iraq’s contemporary history. The mutual exchange and the vital encounter in a youth-led artistic event in the park of Baghdad is a way of retelling the history, with a fresh approach of listening and understanding, that has been transmitted or inherited.With the same intuitive care for listening, Lanah Haddad, another Iraqi Kurdish creative artist at the Tarkib festival in November 2021, plays a social card game she invented with audience participants, inviting them to take off their shoes, sit on a carpet she prepared in the pavilion of the park area dedicated to the festival, and listen to her explain how it works. She wears a traditional red cloth and always smiles, offering a warm tea to the people who sit with her. And the game starts. The drawings in the cards she made show various elements of Iraqi culture and daily life: food, fruits, biscuits, clothes, objects of the house, musical instruments, cars. People play and have to quickly say the name of one of the objects on a card. They have a lot of fun and at the same time share a language (or not: different words in Kurdish or different words in different areas of Iraq) and memories, and they discover what they already know: diversity in their countries, without divisions; laughter and conversation with people they don’t know; playing with a group of friends. Lanah follows the game and listens to the stories and words in the languages or dialects of her fellow players.Lanah studied in Germany and holds a PhD in archaeology. Her research of Iraq is an attempt to fill the gap between academic papers and careers and the need to make the history and the archaeology of her country accessible to all people: After Daesh [ISIS] destroyed Iraqi cultural heritage, I hit on the idea of inventing an easy way to learn a game that makes people feel connected to the heritage, based on the question: Are we archaeologists serving the community? Are we as creatives helping society engage with its heritage? The first educational social game was about the Assyrian Empire in Iraq. Through the game I want to break up with the Victorian British perspective of the region, because if you see the books of archaeology, they also divide history into the different time periods: Assyrian, Babylonian, etc., but there’s a lot in between. The divisions . . . are repeated somehow nowadays in categorizing us as Arabs, Kurds, Sunni, Shiites. . . . I want to break again with that to show there are always regions in the country where there is a melting pot. I want people to understand that history is not something alien. . . . We are making a continuation from the past to these days with different dialects, religions, ethnicities.The second game Lanah invented for the Tarkib festival is called Ditim, which in Kurdish means “I saw it.” Lanah created an atmosphere of nostalgic home, as if the pavilion of the Zawraa Park were a private room where the audience, participants, passersby, or fellow artists—an improvised community of storytellers and performers of new (hi)stories—transform, through their feelings evoked by memories, the social card game into a storytelling session. In Lana’s words: In my childhood home, we used to have only two hours’ electricity, and especially in winter we spend time in the same room, because you can only heat one room; we boil the tea on the sobba [local gas heater]; we eat sunflower seeds and pistachios, sitting together. In this card game, Ditim, I want to create this atmosphere. The card images are nostalgic objects, typical foods famous in Iraq: the orange from Diyala, the watermelon from Mosul, the pomegranate from Halabja, the kebab from Erbil. They articulate memories in society: they have emotional attraction and a memory to share. I want to create the interaction with people: on the same level on the floor, they start not only to play the game but also to scream—they let out this energy! I see there’s an exchange of knowledge, experiences; people start to tell a story, their own stories from the different corners of Iraq. Memories they didn’t think of for a long time come back, and there’s this exchange, especially among different generations.Personal memories and a nostalgic imagination of herself in childhood are part of Lanah’s personal biography. When she was only six, her family had to flee Iraqi Kurdistan and walk through Turkey and along the Balkan route to Germany. Lanah asked her mother when they would return to their homeland, and her mother simply replied: “When the war will finish.” Her family never went back to Kurdistan. She grew up in Germany. As a child and young adolescent, she was afraid to forget the language she knew and the friends she had, so she used to repeat Kurdish words and names to her mom every night as she tried to keep her memories alive. She completed her studies in Germany; then, after her PhD, she decided to move back on her own to Erbil in 2017. “It was the best decision of my life,” she told me. She came back home after twenty years in Germany, and the child who had become an adult, a creative person, made the decision to enjoy her homeland and be part of the change she’d hoped for from afar. As Nadje Al-Ali and Deborah Al-Najjar (2013: xxvi) write in the introduction to We Are Iraqis, “Trauma not only destroys but creates.” What Lanah creates is a game in which sociality and communitarian and participatory interaction become collective healing. Sharing memories with the audience of the Tarkib festival, Lanah founds a community storytelling session, a creative expression to revisit a shared past, made of small, beautiful details—a room, fruits, a heater, a carpet—that have been violently and continuously interrupted by the protracted trauma of exile. Playing is the performing art to reconnect with the self: not alone but in a cathartic collective moment of sharing, laughing, and remembering. The audience laughs and remembers; the participants discuss the meaning of a word in different dialects, the taste of a fruit or a kebab in different cities of their unique country; a community is rebuilding itself by sharing memories (fig. 3).This can be better understood, as Lucia Sorbera (2021: 183) recalls in “Living Archives of the Egyptian Human Rights Movement,” in light of the Italian feminist historian Luisa Passerini’s concept of memory’s “double character” and her assertion that “memory has a history.” Also, Passerini’s critical insights, especially her emphasis on memory as a type of subjectivity and the mutual constitutional relationship between memory and the present, reflect Lanah’s journey back to Iraq and the memories as present-day access to the past and the future. Lanah takes care of the audience, the community of the festival around her game-performance. At the same time, she takes care of herself, carefully listening to the specificities of the individual’s stories that together form the collective history of a fragmented homeland. “Nuridu Watan” (We want a homeland) was the slogan of the 2019 Iraqi revolution.Composing microhistories has been a primary means for young artists to assume agency as they grapple with a history overwhelmed by violence. Roze’s and Lanah’s artistic practices in performing, playing, creating, listening, and involving participants, in the context of Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival, constitute a particularly feminist practice, although the creative protagonists might not be aware of its implementation or definition.I congratulate these artists and invite readers to engage in exchanging with them. Young artists working together in Tarkib House and relating different stories of the city but also resignifying spaces that have been destroyed tell about a new generation wishing to live in peace and stability. They are not just dreaming a change but are engaging cultural and artistic terms to formulate a different narrative of the city—to share, discuss, and interpret collective traumas through artistic means. This starts with the imagination of unpredictable ways in which the city can be transformed and lived. In this making of history, women artists do not live a nostalgic dimension. They conceive of the practice of rebuilding and re-creating as healing: memories to reunite the community and allow its members to fall in love together with the new narratives of the future.