This project is part of my ongoing research into the visual culture of southern Mesopotamia, focusing on carpet-making traditions of southern Iraq alongside (Shia) Islamic iconography. The southern Iraqi carpet-making craft is hardly documented. Little exists on the meaning of symbols, cultural background, or historical relevance of these fabrics. Through long-term research and archiving, the work develops a contemporary interpretation of this endangered visual language. In technical terms, the compositions are created in Aseprite, software designed for drawing and animating pixel art. Since 2023, I have been working with the TextielMuseum and its TextielLab in Tilburg on the earlier project Garden of Eden, where the methodology used in this work was first developed. This collaboration has been documented and exhibited at the TextielMuseum and has been on view in the exhibition Secrets of Making. As a result, the elaboration is so well matched to machine weaving that it becomes possible to work in great detail. In this sense, the intricate digital pixel work can be understood as a form of “technic,” borrowing from the writing of the Italian philosopher Federico Campagna, where technical systems carry the potential for transformative or even magical operations. The highly structured digital grid becomes a system through which symbolic and mythological imagery is translated into material form.
The work also emerges from the experience of forced displacement—a condition shared, in different but connected ways, with the communities of southern Iraq, who have endured a long history of political oppression, environmental devastation, and displacement, conditions that have disrupted the transmission and continuity of their material and visual culture. Rather than attempting to reconstruct a lost tradition, the project seeks to keep these visual languages and symbologies present by carrying them forward and recontextualizing their legacy through contemporary artistic transformation.

Artist: Hussein Shikha
Production: TextielLab, TextielMuseum Tilburg
Coding and weaving: Marjan van Oeffelt
Photography: Jan van Eyck Academie

With support from: Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (residency), DE SINGEL International Arts Centre, Antwerp (residency),  TextielLab, TextielMuseum Tilburg (production support) Pomona Art Fund, Belgium (grant), Antwerp Nieuwe Maker (funding), Het Bos, Antwerp (residency).

Hussein Shikha (IQ) works across film, animation, textile, and video game design, engaging layered symbologies drawn from Iraqi heritage and personal memory. His pixel drawings fragment and encode recollection, echoing Islamic traditions of concealment. Born in Iraq, he moved to Antwerp in 2009. He holds MAs from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Sint Lucas Antwerp. Shown at Nieuwe Instituut, BAK, KIOSK, and Extra City. Recipient of the 2025 POMONA Art Fund Grant and member of the 2025 Jan van Eyck Academie cohort.

They Who Saw Nothing but Beauty is a powerful reimagining of cultural heritage through contemporary digital practice. At a moment when conflict, displacement, and environmental change continue to threaten cultural memory and material traditions, Hussein Shikha’s work offers a compelling act of preservation through transformation. Drawing on the endangered carpet-making traditions and visual languages of southern Iraq, the project develops a contemporary archive of symbols, histories, and mythologies that might otherwise be lost. Created through intricate pixel drawings and realized through advanced Jacquard weaving technologies, the jury was particularly struck by the relationship between craft and computation at the heart of the work.