Art history usually arrives looking structured and well-organised. There are dates, movements, important names and confident wall texts explaining who influenced whom. Everything appears to have happened in a logical order, with excellent administrative support.

Real life is less considerate.

Paintings disappear. Archives are destroyed. Documents are scattered across countries and private collections. Artists leave home, institutions collapse, memories become unreliable, and wars tend not to pause politely while somebody finishes cataloguing the cultural record.

This is the complicated territory of All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, curated by Dr Nada Shabout at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. Originally scheduled to close earlier this year, the exhibition has now been extended until January 3, 2027 — which gives us more time to examine not only what it brings together, but also what remains missing.

We have already spoken to Dr Nada Shabout about how the exhibition evolved between New York and Abu Dhabi. This time, we are looking more closely at one of its most compelling ideas: how do you tell the story of an art movement when paintings, documents and parts of its history are difficult, or sometimes impossible, to trace?

The exhibition’s answer is refreshingly honest. Instead of disguising those gaps, it brings them into view.

Yet missing material is only one thread within a much larger exhibition. At its heart, All Manner of Experiments is about artists trying to define modernism from Baghdad, their use of heritage as a source of invention and the ways their ideas continued to resonate long after the group’s original moment.

The exhibition traces the Baghdad Modern Art Group, established in 1951 by Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said. It brings together the group’s founders and original members alongside artists from subsequent generations whose practices engage with related questions of history, identity, displacement and belonging.

Following Iraq’s formal independence from Britain in 1932, artists were navigating a new political and social reality. Many studied at European art academies, where they encountered Western modernism as well as objects from their own ancient heritage displayed in European museums. This experience sharpened their understanding that modernism didn’t belong exclusively to Europe, whatever certain textbooks and very confident museum departments might have implied.

Baghdad wasn’t a distant recipient waiting for modern art to arrive by post. It was a centre of cultural production with its own histories, visual languages and ideas to contribute. The group brought together artists, architects, poets and critics who organised exhibitions, published manifestos and considered how modern art might respond to contemporary Iraq while remaining part of an international conversation.

Central to their thinking was istilham al-turath, or drawing inspiration from heritage. This didn’t mean copying the past and hoping nobody noticed. The artists looked towards Mesopotamian civilisations, Abbasid Baghdad, Islamic art and popular culture, treating heritage as active material: something to examine, reinterpret and occasionally argue with.

Their approach positioned tradition not as modernism’s embarrassing older relative, but as one of the means through which new artistic forms could be created. Experimentation was not a rejection of history. It was a way of making history speak differently.

This experimental ethos provides the exhibition with its real centre. The archival gaps complicate how the group’s story can be reconstructed, but the surviving works and documents reveal an ambitious intellectual project: the development of a modern visual language grounded in Iraq’s histories without being confined by them.

While the exhibition establishes the group’s ideas and experiments, reconstructing the full story behind them is more complicated. The Baghdad Modern Art Group operated through exhibitions, manifestos and a changing circle of artists, architects, poets and critics, but the record of those activities hasn’t survived intact.

Some posters, brochures, artworks and personal records remain. Others are missing, fragmented or known only through references in documents that can no longer be found. Tracing certain artists associated with the group and locating particular works can therefore become a research project of its own — one without the courtesy of a guaranteed conclusion.

This incompleteness doesn’t diminish the group’s intellectual importance. If anything, the surviving material makes its ambitions remarkably clear. Its members weren’t merely adopting an international modernist style; they were working out how modernism could emerge from Baghdad, draw upon Iraq’s layered histories and still speak beyond national borders.

The archive may be untidy, but the central idea remains visible: heritage could enable experimentation rather than prevent it. This is where istilham al-turath becomes more than a curatorial term. It describes a method through which the artists transformed references to the past into a language for their present.

In other words, this isn't the sort of history that fits obediently into a spreadsheet.

The gaps didn't appear by accident.

Decades of political upheaval, war, sanctions, displacement and the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq caused immense damage to the country’s cultural institutions. Museums and archives were looted. Artworks were stolen, severely damaged or dispersed. Private papers travelled with families leaving the country, while other documents simply vanished.

The exhibition includes paintings, posters, brochures, manifestos and other archival materials, but it is equally shaped by what isn't there. There are artworks known to have existed that can't now be located. References point towards documents whose whereabouts remain unknown. As Shabout explained in our interview, tracing some of the group’s artists and locating specific works by certain members can be especially difficult.

Absence, then, isn't an empty space around the exhibition. It is part of the exhibition’s subject.

That distinction matters. A missing painting tells us something about the conditions through which art survives. A scattered archive reveals not only the history of an artistic movement, but also the political and social forces that disrupted it.

Still, All Manner of Experiments doesn’t allow loss to become the entire story. The surviving works and documents also reveal the group’s exhibitions, arguments, experiments and evolving understanding of modernism. What has disappeared matters, but so does the intellectual and artistic legacy that endured.

Museums often make knowledge look definitive. Here, uncertainty is treated with unusual honesty. The exhibition doesn't invent a convenient bridge every time the evidence stops. Sometimes, it allows the visitor to see the break.

In our interview with Dr Nada Shabout, the curator described the exhibition as the result of many years of research, but not as a fixed or final account. It first appeared at the Hessel Museum of Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in New York, in a presentation curated by Shabout with Tiffany Floyd and Lauren Cornell. It then travelled to Abu Dhabi, where approximately 30 per cent of it changed.

New works and artists entered the story. Different connections became visible. The exhibition was reorganised into thematic clusters addressing the founders, members, exhibitions, manifesto and the concept of istilham al-turath. Younger and diasporic voices expanded the conversation around the group’s legacy beyond its original period.

“Almost every iteration is a continuation,” Shabout told us. “We keep the core, but we negotiate new aspects each time.”

This makes the exhibition closer to an evolving research project than a completed historical verdict. Its curatorial process responds to discoveries, locations and newly available works. Moving it to Abu Dhabi wasn't simply a matter of shipping crates and checking whether the labels survived the journey.

The regional context altered the narrative. Among the additions was Rand Abdul Jabbar, an Iraqi-born artist based in Abu Dhabi whose relationship with Iraq developed through inherited memories, domestic objects and later journeys to Baghdad. Her work extends the exhibition’s central questions into another generation: how is heritage understood when home is partly remembered, partly imagined and partly encountered after the fact?

This is what makes the missing pieces productive rather than merely unfortunate. They create room to ask who carries the group’s ideas forward when its original context has changed and its archives have become dispersed. Abdul Jabbar isn’t presented as a continuation of the Baghdad Modern Art Group itself, but as a younger artist engaging with related ideas around heritage and istilham al-turath.

One of the exhibition’s most powerful stories concerns Jewad Selim’s Monument of Freedom, commissioned by the Municipality of Baghdad following the 1958 revolution.

Earlier colonial and royal monuments had been removed, and Selim was asked to produce a public work for a changing Iraq. The resulting monument combined figuration, abstraction and historical references in a sequence of bronze forms. It became a symbol of collective memory and, remarkably, survived successive political regimes.

Its survival may owe something to its openness. Because the monument doesn't deliver one simple political message, different generations have been able to read themselves into it. Abstraction, often accused of being evasive, proved unusually good at staying alive.

Elsewhere, absence becomes more intimate. Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s The House That My Father Built considers home through grief, memory and displacement. Abdul Jabbar’s ceramics connect ancient material histories with inherited experience. Across these works, heritage isn't presented as an intact object passed carefully from one generation to the next. It is reconstructed from fragments, family stories, images, objects and returns.

Together, these works demonstrate the reach of the group’s ideas without suggesting that its legacy followed one straight, uninterrupted line. Modernism becomes something Iraqi artists actively shaped rather than passively received. Istilham al-turath becomes a method for transforming heritage rather than simply preserving it. Later artists revisit related questions from new positions, particularly through experiences of diaspora, inherited memory and displacement.

The Baghdad Modern Art Group’s legacy therefore survives in more than its surviving artworks. It lives in a method: looking backwards without becoming trapped there, and experimenting precisely because the past is complicated.

Located at the entrance to the NYU Abu Dhabi campus, the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery is designed to accommodate exhibitions across all media, from experimental presentations to traditional museum installations. It also presents work at The Project Space in The Arts Center, extending its programme into another setting for research, artistic exchange and public encounter.

That flexibility is particularly important for All Manner of Experiments. This is an exhibition of artworks, but also of posters, archival documents, historical timelines, research and unresolved questions. It requires a space capable of presenting art history not as a finished chapter, but as knowledge still being assembled.

Even the gallery’s coloured walls contribute to that argument. Rather than placing everything inside the supposedly neutral white cube, the exhibition draws colours from the artists’ paintings and original exhibition posters. It is a small but telling refusal of the idea that every modernist history must be displayed according to the same museum conventions.

The NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery provides a setting in which Shabout’s long-term scholarship and the research developed through the original CCS Bard project can be presented, questioned and expanded for audiences in the region. Here, artworks, archival materials and unresolved absences come together to illuminate the group’s contribution to modernism and the continuing relevance of its ideas.

All Manner of Experiments doesn't reduce the Baghdad Modern Art Group to what has been lost. Instead, it demonstrates how much remains: an ambitious body of work, a distinctly Iraqi contribution to modernism and an experimental approach to heritage that continues to invite new interpretations.

History, after all, doesn't become less important when pieces are missing. Usually, that is when we need to look more closely.