Spheres of Influence

‘Spheres of Influence’ is a single-channel film that records official war artist Susan Norrie’s response to her October 2016 deployment to Camp Taji in Iraq. She arrived two weeks after the Battle of Mosul started, in which Iraqi and allied forces sought to win back the city of Mosul from Daesh (also known as ISIL/ISIS.) During her deployment Norrie filmed a daily record of life on the base for the Australian, New Zealander and Iraqi personnel. The Australian Defence Force operations were focused on training Iraqi soldiers. This was used as the basis for the film, which records contemporary events in the context of the histories of Iraq and the Middle East more broadly.

Norrie juxtaposed the sequences from Camp Taji with footage she filmed at the Palace of Versailles with Salah Al-Hamdani – an Iraqi poet, dissident and former Iraqi Army veteran who spent time at Camp Taji in the late 1960s – roaming the galleries, overlaid with excerpts from a series of interviews Norrie undertook with him. The footage from Taji and Versailles appears unrelated, but Norrie teases out the connections with the voiceover of Salah Al-Hamdani.

Norrie invites Al-Hamdani to be a voice for these contested histories and conflicts in the Middle East as someone with direct experience of their consequences. He speaks about his history, military service and imprisonment, as well as the current conflicts in the Middle East and the way they relate back to the Treaty of Versailles with agreements made 100 years ago, and the current and ongoing struggles of the Iraqi people.

Susan Norrie is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, working primarily in video and installation art, exploring social, political and environmental issues. She represented Australia at the 2007 Venice Biennale and in 2019 was awarded an Australia Council Visual Arts Award for her major contribution to Australian contemporary art and cultural life.