Re-experiencing of isolation and lacking infrastructure as a returning event. In FLESHBACK 2015 Rawan Almukhtar challenges the daily covers of US front pages with romantic images of military ordnance, "bomb explosions in the air" over the streets and houses of Baghdad. Also challenging idea of post-invasion masculinities during a new cycle of war and militarization. Depicting the male adolescent body unharmed, intimate, vulnerable and playful. Beyond racialised and hyper-masculinised notions, Rawan Almukhtar wanted to create a place beyond sectarian and colonial-racist pretence. An intimate place to witness a short glimpse of experiences of people born shortly after or during the invasion in 2003.

Nothing But Blue - A Collection in Retrospectivity is a collection that partly has traveled from Baghdad to Vienna. It reflects working conditions of Rawan Almukhtar one year before leaving Iraq and the process of seeking asylum in Vienna/Austria. The works give insight of the structural conditions in a country scattered by the occupation and wars, as well as the results of violent events of the post-occupation era. State sanctioned violence and the criminalisation of critical public discourse made Rawan Almukhtar reveal the inspiration and political intents of this collection years later, in retrospect. In this collection Rawan Almukhtar asks how (self-)representation and artistic expression can be practiced as a form of resistance, as a practice of counter-memory and as a form of being alive.