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“Allspice: Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures” (on view through October 31, 2025) marks the first time that the Acropolis Museum has shown contemporary work next to historical artifacts. Named for a spice frequently used in the cooking of Rakowitz’s Jewish-Iraqi mother, the show is in many ways a search for the missing ingredient linking lost heritage, diasporic longings, and phantom motherlands.
Among many previous and ongoing series, a new commission by the nonprofit NEON art foundation features recipes written by the artist’s mother collaged onto large white pillars—described by NEON director Elina Kountouri (who co-curated the show together with Acropolis Museum director Nikos Stampolidis) as “columns of remembrance that stand against authoritarianism, displacement, and loss.” Rakowitz says that allspice, a common ingredient in these recipes, serves “as a good substitute [that] preserves the flavor profile of the recipe.” That theme of substitution provides a metaphorical link to his broader practice: “Substitute is derived from the Latin substituere, which comes from statuere, whose noun derivative is statua, or statue, which seems central to my work as a sculptor for the past two decades: making sculptures that are substitutions for other sculptures that have disappeared or been destroyed.”
The obvious allusion in this context is to the missing Elgin Marbles, and from a curatorial point of view, the exhibition is reminiscent of the top floor of the Acropolis Museum, where the remaining genuine Elgin Marbles are situated next to copies of the stolen ones. In a similar vein, the Rakowitz exhibition plays with the real and the reimagined, to great effect.
Thirteen objects from the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and one from the Thanos N. Zintilis Collection of Cypriot Antiquities share two galleries with Rakowitz’s work. Their respective narratives fuse in fascinating ways. “Allspice” includes selections from the artist’s long-running (and ongoing) series “The invisible enemy should not exist”—a project that aims to re-create every one of the 7,000 artifacts from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad that were looted or destroyed during and after the U.S. invasion. Each object is made with his team of studio assistants using cardboard, Middle Eastern food packaging, and Arabic and Aramaic newspapers, glue, and museum labels.
72 cylinder seals and their impressions (2021), one part of this encyclopedic series, pays homage to Mesopotamia’s contribution to civilization through writing and the preservation of memory. The objects in the vitrine combine re-creations of the two-to-three-centimeter cylinders engraved with written characters and/or figurative scenes (prototypes for cuneiform) and contemporary quotations from Iraqi archaeologists and heritage experts. The most moving is from the late archaeologist and Minister of Culture Abdulameer Al-Hamdani, who wrote, “Watching the looting made me feel like a man who lost his lover in a great sea and stood waiting on the shore looking for her.”
Additional selections from the series are what Rakowitz describes as “reappearances”: vibrant, colorful papier-mâché re-creations of guardian figures—winged beasts with human faces known as lamassu—from the Palace of Nimrud, destroyed by ISIS in 2015. Empty spaces with archaeological captions summon the ghosts of objects excavated and removed by foreign powers in the 19th century as well as more contemporary looting and destruction.
“Allspice: Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures” will be followed by the presentation of Rakowitz’s sculpture The invisible enemy should not exist/Lamassu of Nineveh (2018), on the western side of the Acropolis Museum, from October 2025–December 2026.