The chaotic and loose entanglements and intersections between social and intellectual systems result in a city with hybrid characteristics that are unlike the more common aspects of other civilized cities. Cities that fall victim to these unruly dynamics derive their formal natures from random mechanisms and sociocultural behaviors that follow a completely different set of laws. Among the examples that caught my attention are the tall poles wrapped with scores of long wires. Facing them, I found myself encircled by a forest of electrical wires, like mazes with no beginning and no end. This is the product of a crisis derived from a lack of visual culture, as well as a lack of awareness of the aesthetics of an urban environment, producing a city that is doomed to suffer from an absence of refinement and wisdom, a city that once was the most beautiful and the most majestic. My latest experience, which came about years after my last painful visit to my beloved homeland, which showed me the transformation of my beautiful Baghdad into a large hotbed of interlocking electrical wires that have led to even more distortions to the random construction and the chaos of poor aesthetics. In that chaotic city scene, I conceived a way to describe what I felt inside, to transform those interwoven wires into more formal units that are repeated in a number of the works presented in this exhibition, a conceptual reconstruction of the afflicted city of Baghdad, which was once one of the most magnificent in the history of the Arab region. Delair Shaker