When the power went out in Iraqi artist Hussein Shikha’s childhood home, it was the detailed carpets on the floor—filled with characters and stories—that took the place of the TV screen. Now, he uses tapestry, digital animation and interactive installations to bring abstract and fantastical ideas into conversation with traditional Islamic art, telling stories inspired by Islamic texts and Iraqi history. He tells Yasmin Alrabiei why it’s so important to keep the spirit of Iraq’s handmade tapestry traditions alive, and to highlight the beauty in the country’s resilience in the face of struggle.
During the American invasion of Iraq, electricity came in sudden, unpredictable bursts. For a young Hussein Shikha—like many Iraqi children, confined indoors to avoid the dangers outside—those brief hours of power offered an escape. “My parents’ solution was to buy us a Playstation 1,” he tells me. “Legend of Mana,” with its arabesques, fantasy creatures and ornamental landscapes, left a sensory imprint on him. When the power cut, taking the screen with it, the carpet beneath him remained. Its dense geometries would pick up where the game left off: characters moving through warp and weft, flickering inside the weave. It was in this oscillation—the ephemeral glow of pixel worlds and the tactility of textile—that Shikha’s childhood imagination bloomed into his current practice.
“Carpet making is a form of knotting, which is also a form of coding,” Shikha says. “When I look at a carpet or knitted sweater, I see pixels in the knots, like its DNA. Weaving is like the great, great-grandparent of our phones and computers.” Even the Jacquard loom, with its punched cards controlling woven patterns, directly influenced early computing—the logic of weaving is inseparable from digital technology.
Shikha’s work remains in conversation with the visual narratives of Southern Iraqi tapestry tradition that adorned his grandmother’s home. “The region itself carries multiple temporalities,” he says, referring to the blended genealogy of the Marsh Arabs (Ma’dan). “It is regarded as the site of the Garden of Eden, so the community honors its ancient Sumerian heritage while still upholding deeply Shia Muslim customs—a really fascinating duality.”
Now at risk of erasure, he explains how “various calamities befell southern Iraq causing people to abandon their artistry. They had to prioritise survival over craft. From repeated foreign invasions, to the drainage of the marshes and Saddam’s construction of dams to punish the Shia population, weavers were displaced and forced to leave their ancestral ways of living.” He speculates on the lost possibilities of this tapestry tradition, had its trajectory not been violently punctuated by war and ecological collapse. “I began to imagine carpets as animations or pixelated systems, which guides my process of digitizing them into interactive works.”
Shikha’s research grit underpins every aspect of his practice. He explores the texts of IbnʿArabi, Al-Mutanabbi and Ibn Sīnā with impressive fluency, drawing on their influential frameworks of Islamic epistemologies. Immersed in seminal texts like Zakariya al-Qazwini’s “The Wonders of Creatures and the Marvels of Creation,” he uses tapestry, digital animation and interactive installations to explore abstraction and fantastical motifs through an Islamic art lens.
“Islamic art is usually viewed within Western art-historical frameworks,” he says, “but it follows its own temporal rhythms and intersects or diverges from other civilizations on its own terms…leading me to explore what ‘abstraction’ in carpets could mean from this perspective.” He researched these themes rigorously during his 2025 fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy.
Shikha leans into this high visual density in “With the Will of Fire” to create a sensorial experience beyond seeing. He draws on interfaith philosopher Laura Marks’ concept of engaging with carpets, noting that “She defines this as haptic visuality, where eyes function as organs of touch, seeking texture and flow rather than fixed forms.”
Shikha moved to Antwerp from Iraq in 2009 and holds a Master’s in Visual Arts from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and an Advanced Master’s in Research in Art and Design from Sint Lucas Antwerp. His practice has since been presented at BAK, Utrecht; Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; TextielMuseum, Tilburg; Het Bos, Antwerp, among others.
Through five tapestries commissioned by the TextielMuseum, Hussein revisits the historic Battle of Karbala, where Imam Hussein a.s, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad a.s, was brutally killed by the army of tyrannical caliph Yazid, whose regime was infamous for its cruelty and extortion. For Shia Muslims like Shikha, Karbala serves as a paradigmatic ethical prism, framing the duty to confront contemporary injustices and venerate the martyred—ritualized during Arbaeen, one of the world’s largest annual pilgrimages.
In the aftermath, Imam Hussein's sister, Sayyida Zaynab a.s was mockingly asked how she endured the brutal deaths of her brothers. Her response courses through history and through Shikha's work; I saw nothing but beauty. Over time, it crystallized into a maxim of resistance: amid hardships intended to deter us, there is triumph in beholding beauty yet unfolding.
“Garden of Eden,” Shikhas first woven tapestry, commissioned by Extra City in Antwerp and woven to life at the Textile Museum in Tilburg, exemplifies this ethos. “By depicting the tragedy of Karbala and employing some of the symbols the Marsh Arabs used in everyday life, I feel a powerful historical and spiritual continuity,” Shikha says. Recurring motifs—horses, swords, lions, stars—evoke the ecological and socio-historical layers of Iraq's storied past.
Departing from the vibrant colors of traditional southern Iraqi carpets, he uses black and white, achieving intensity through saturation and density, where meaning and texture arise instead from the salient contrast of symbols. “For me, it's important to situate symbols in their ecosystems: birds among reeds, fish within rivers, herons eating fish.”
Contrastingly, he also resists fixed classification with a semiotic approach that designs new meanings, explaining that “IbnʿArabi’s approach of placing concepts and elements together so that new interrelations and mnemonic associations could emerge was also influential.”
Shikha dislocates beauty from its safe, romanticized confines. “It’s something that survives beyond violence. It reflects Sayyida Zaynab’s enduring paradox: that in the face of cruelty, there is a higher form of beauty found in endurance and memory,” he shares. Through the resilience of the Marsh Arabs amid ecological crisis, Iraq’s civilizational arc from Babylon to Sumeria to Akkadia, and Islamic devotion immortalizing an era-making massacre 14 centuries past, his work challenges the passive notion of beauty as merely ornamental. Shikha renders Iraqi aesthetics inseparable from the moral and political reckoning of our times—an ethics of steadfastness urgently needed today—insisting that to witness, to refuse capitulation, to weep for our brothers and to rise from that weeping—that is a legacy of beauty.