Ali Eyal transforms a final childhood view of Baghdad into a deeply personal meditation on memory, departure, family, and the ways we continue to carry places with us long after leaving them behind.
Memory has a powerful presence throughout the Whitney Biennial 2026.
Across the exhibition, artists return to places, people, and experiences that continue to shape them. Personal histories intersect with larger political events, revealing how geopolitical forces can become inseparable from individual lives.
Curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, the Biennial brings these different histories together within the Whitney Museum, creating an exhibition where displacement, identity, memory, and place repeatedly intersect.
Ali Eyal’s work approaches these questions through an intensely personal memory of Baghdad.
A City Reconstructed From Memory
At the center of Eyal’s contribution is a cityscape of Baghdad.
But he is not attempting to document the city through direct observation.
Instead, the image is reconstructed entirely through memory.
The painting returns to a moment shortly before the Iraq War began in 2003—a moment that would become a turning point in Eyal’s life.
He remembers his mother taking him and his two sisters to a large amusement park in Baghdad before they left the country.
It became a final encounter with the city before departure.
Years later, that memory provides the foundation for the painting.
Looking at Baghdad From Above
The perspective is particularly striking.
Baghdad is seen from the elevated viewpoint of a Ferris wheel.
From above, the city stretches outward through lights, buildings, and atmosphere. There is a sense of taking everything in at once, almost as though the act of looking has already become an act of remembering.
The scene feels vivid but also dreamlike.
Details appear filtered through time and emotion rather than reconstructed with documentary precision.
That distinction is central to the work.
Eyal is not necessarily painting Baghdad exactly as it appeared.
He is painting the Baghdad that remains in his memory.
A Mother’s Gesture
Within the cityscape appears the figure of Eyal’s mother.
She gestures toward Baghdad, seemingly pointing something out to her children.
It is an ordinary gesture, yet within the circumstances surrounding the memory, it acquires enormous emotional weight.
The gesture connects mother and child, but it also seems to connect past and future, presence and departure.
There is tenderness in the scene alongside an unavoidable awareness of loss.
The viewer understands that the city being looked at will soon become something remembered from elsewhere.
What begins as a family outing therefore becomes a memory of transition.
Painting What Can No Longer Be Revisited
This is what gives Eyal’s cityscape its emotional intensity.
It is not simply a painting of Baghdad.
It is the reconstruction of a moment that cannot be experienced again in precisely the same way.
The physical city continues to exist and change, but the Baghdad preserved within this particular memory belongs to a specific moment in Eyal’s childhood.
Painting allows him to return to it.
Yet the work also acknowledges the impossibility of completely recovering the past.
Memory changes.
Certain details become sharper while others disappear.
Emotions can become attached to images in ways that alter how those images are recalled.
Eyal allows that instability to remain visible.
Memory as Preservation
Within the larger context of the Whitney Biennial, the painting connects personal memory with histories of displacement and political upheaval.
Rather than attempting to represent the Iraq War through a sweeping historical narrative, Eyal approaches its consequences through an intimate experience.
A mother.
Three children.
An amusement park.
A Ferris wheel.
A final view across Baghdad.
These details demonstrate how enormous geopolitical events enter individual lives through specific moments.
The political becomes personal.
Carrying a City With You
Eyal’s work also raises a larger question about what happens to our relationship with a place after we leave it.
Cities are not carried only through photographs, maps, or physical objects.
They can also survive internally.
A street can remain through a memory.
A skyline can survive through an image.
A gesture from a family member can preserve an entire moment.
In Eyal’s painting, Baghdad becomes both a geographical location and an internal landscape.
The city exists simultaneously as place and memory.
Between Personal and Geopolitical History
That relationship makes the work particularly resonant within the Whitney Biennial 2026.
Throughout the exhibition, personal experiences intersect with much larger systems—migration, political conflict, national histories, cultural identity, and displacement.
Eyal approaches these enormous subjects through intimacy rather than spectacle.
His painting creates a moment of stillness.
Standing before it, the viewer is invited to consider not only the history surrounding the image but also the emotional experience contained within it.
What does it mean to leave?
What happens to our memories of home?
And how do we continue carrying a place after physical distance separates us from it?
When Place Becomes Memory
Ali Eyal’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2026 ultimately reaches beyond one person’s experience.
Its origins are deeply personal, rooted in his own childhood and his family’s departure from Baghdad.
But the emotional questions surrounding the work are much broader.
Leaving.
Remembering.
Family.
Home.
Distance.
The desire to preserve something that time continues to transform.
Through painting, Eyal gives physical form to something inherently unstable: memory itself.
The Baghdad represented in the work exists somewhere between a real city and a remembered one, between history and emotion, between what happened and what remains.
And perhaps that is what makes the work so affecting.
Sometimes leaving a place does not mean leaving it behind.
Sometimes we continue carrying it with us.
Explore the Complete Tarik Talk Whitney Biennial 2026 Series
Tarik Talk created dedicated coverage of every artist featured in the Whitney Biennial 2026, with individual episodes exploring the artists, artworks, histories, and ideas shaping this edition of the Biennial.
The complete series—including videos and podcast episodes—is available across Tarik Talk’s podcast streaming platforms and social media platforms, offering a closer look at every artist featured in the Whitney Biennial 2026.