Eden in Iraq: Interdisciplinary Environmental Art and Design exhibition

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.