Michael Rakowitz

Working across film, sculpture, installation and architectural interventions, Chicago-based Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz explores recent contested social, political and cultural histories. Drawing on geopolitical events and his own lived experiences, growing up with an Iraqi mother and American father, Rakowitz’s practice delves into history and popular culture. His illustrated objects and installations invite viewers to contemplate their complicit relationship to the world around them. Working since 1997, Rakowitz has explored the relationships between conflict and its influence on everyday life, probing the potential for art to question the sociopolitical boundaries of what it means to be human.

Rakowitz interrogates social geographies on a local, regional, and global scale, working at the intersection of problem-solving and trouble-making. Among his first projects is paraSITE (1998 ongoing), a series of custom built inflatable structures designed for unhoused people that attach to the exterior outtakem vents of a building’s Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. More recently, Rakowitz’s work explores the geopolitical terrain and context surrounding historical and current events, revealing conventional history as a series of isolated perspectives told from various positions of privilege. In 2018, Rakowitz was awarded a public commission for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in London entitled The invisible enemy should not exist (Lamassu of Nineveh), reappearing the Assyrian deity that stood guard in Nineveh for nearly three thousand years before it was destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Constructed out of 10,0000 empty date syrup cans, Iraq’s second largest export, Rakowitz comments on the simultaneous commodification and destruction of Iraqi culture.

Michael Rakowitz lives and works in Chicago, US. He studied at Purchase College SUNY, New York (1995) followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (1998). Recent solo exhibitions include Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2023); Barakat Contemporary, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2021); Wellin Museum of Art, New York, US (2020); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2020); Whitechapel, London, UK (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, US (2017); Museum of Modern Art, New York, US (2015). He is the recipient of the Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square, London, UK (2018-2020); The Nasher Prize (2020); The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018); The Tiffany Foundation Award (2012); The Creative Capital Grant (2008); The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant in Architecture and Environmental Structures (2006); The Dena Foundation Award (2003); and the Design 21 Grand Prix from UNESCO (2002). His works are featured in major private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, US; Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, US; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, US; Van Abbemuseum, Endhoven, Netherlands; The British Museum, London, UK; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US; Kabul National Museum, Afghanistan and UNESCO, Paris, France. Rakowitz is a Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

In September 2025 Rakowitz's work will be presented in a solo exhibtion at Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway.