Eden in Iraq
Interdisciplinary Environmental Art and Design exhibition
SINGAPORE 6 - 20 October 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, 6 October 2017, 7 – 9 pm
Guests-of-Honor:
Dr. Alan Chan, Dean School of Humanities, Art,
and Social Sciences
Jasim Al Asaidi, engr, Regional Director,
Nature Iraq, Ngo ,El Chibaish, S. Iraq
Booksigning: 6
October 2017 8:30pm
Eden Turned on its
Side by Meridel Rubenstein, University of New
Mexico Press, USA
Artist Talk: Meridel Rubenstein and Peer Sathikh Saturday 14 October 2017, 3-4pm
Eden In Iraq
is an interdisciplinary, environmental art and design exhibition
tracing the evolution of the wastewater remediation project in the marshes of
southern Iraq near the historic site of the Garden
of Eden.
We have used environmental art, design, and
wastewater to create a restorative wastewater garden for cultural memory,
education, and shared social space. Drawing on Islamic and Mesopotamian
traditions originating in this historically and symbolically charged region,
the Eden in Iraq Waste Water Garden is designed to be a syncretic
container for ecological and cultural restoration.
On
display at the National Design Center October 6-20 will be design and
engineering drawings, models, photo, art, and video works The rich history of
the Marshes and its People are discovered through this work. The project, to design a wastewater
garden in S. Iraq, has had the support
of many levels of Iraqi society from villages to the Prime Minister’s Office.
The Interdisciplinary Design Team
MERIDEL
RUBENSTEIN has been a Visiting Associate Professor at the School of Art,
Design, and Media since 2007, She
maintains her studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the USA. She
has exhibited widely including the Louvre, Paris; Museum of Contemporary
Photography in Chicago and The List Center for the Visual Arts at MIT.
She has received
fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation and Harvard University, awards from the National Endowment of
the Arts, the Pollock Krasner and Rockefeller Foundations. She was educated at
Sarah Lawrence College in New York and did special graduate studies at M.I.T.
with the eminent photographer, Minor White. She received an M.A./M.F.A. from
the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1974/1977.
Please see www.meridelrubenstein.com/eden-in-iraq.
Peer M. Sathikh
joined the School of Art Design and Media (ADM) as an Assistant Professor in
August 2008 after 22 years as a professional industrial designer. He is
presently Associate Chair. He obtained a Master of Design (MDesRCA) in
industrial design from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London and a Master
of Design in product design from Industrial Design Centre, Indian
Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He has a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) degree
in Mechanical Engineering from the College of Engineering, Chennai.
Past President of the Designers Association
Singapore (DAS), Peer Sathikh is also a member of the Industrial Designers
Society of America (IDSA), Product Design and Management Association (PDMA),
USA and the Design Research Society (DRS), UK.
Dr. Sander van der Leeuw, renown complexity scientist
and archaeologist, is former Dean of the
School
of Sustainability in Arizona State University’s Global
Institute
of Sustainability and Professor of
Human Evolution
and
Social Change.
Dr.
Mark Nelson, PhD, is a
founding director of the Institute of Ecotechnics and has worked for several
decades in closed ecological system research, ecological engineering, the
restoration of damaged ecosystems, desert agriculture and wastewater recycling.
He is Chairman and CEO of the Institute of Ecotechnics (www.ecotechnics.edu),a U.K. and
U.S. non-profit organization, which consults to several demonstration projects
working in challenging biomes around the world; Vice Chairman of Global
Ecotechnics Corp. (www.globalecotechnics.com), head of Wastewater Gardens
International (www.wastewatergardens.com). Dr.Nelson has helped pioneer a new
ecological approach to sewage treatment, “Wastewater Gardens®” which are
constructed subsurface flow wetlands with high biodiversity and has created
over 90 such systems in Mexico, Belize, Bali & Sulawesi, Indonesia, West Australia, France, Spain,
Portugal, Poland, the Bahamas,
the Philippines, Algeria and
the United States since 1996 (www.wastewatergardens.com).
He was a founding member of
Biopshere 2. This 3 acre materially closed facility near Tucson, Arizona was
the world’s first laboratory for global ecology. Dr. Nelson was a member of the
eight person “biospherian" crew for the first two year closure 1991-93.
Davide
Tocchetto, is an
Agronomist, with a PhD in Environmental Agronomy (2006, Padova University, Italy). He also studied
“Forests and Woods Management” and
“Agricultural and Environmental Management” and has a degree in
“Agricultural Sciences” from Padova University (1998). His professional
experiences and interests range from wastewater treatment with natural systems
to freelance research collaborations with Italian and International
Universities, Private companies, The United Nations, and other International
Agencies.
He
has designed and built over 100 constructed wetland systems and authored over
35 scientific and technical papers on water treatment and environmental water
quality.
He
heads a patent for a floating wetland
system.
Jasim
Al-Asadi is the managing director of the regional S. Iraq office of Nature Iraq NGO in Chibaish. He is an hydraulic engineer and
consultant, lecturing internationally about the Mesopotamian Marshes. Nature
Iraq was created to protect, restore,
and preserve Iraq’s natural environment and the rich cultural heritage that it
nourishes.
He has a B.Sc in Engineering, from the University of Technology,
Baghdad 1980 and has extensive work experience as an engineer on water
remediation projects throughout Iraq. He was Director (2003-05) of the socio-economical studies section – for
CRIM (Center for Restoration of Iraqi Marshlands/MWoR Ministry of Water
Resources and 1985-2003: Manager and supervising engineer in the Ministry of
WaterResources – Research and Development Directorate where he
directed numerous socio-economic surveys for the region.
