"I don't want to avoid telling a story, but I want very, very much to do the thing that Valéry said - to give the sensation without the boredom of its conveyance. And the moment the story enters, the boredom comes upon you."
—Francis Bacon

“In Alto Cutelo
The juniper no longer sprouts (…)
For a week the woman
hasn’t lit the fire (…)
Her husband left for Lisbon
A long time ago
He was hired (...)
Cheap labour
A shack without electricity
Another dark day
On earth”
—The song Alto Cutelo

“We must abandon all models, and study our possibilities.”
—E. A. Poe

"The most effective way to survive exile is to produce memory."
—Débora Diniz

‘Here many representations and images jostle in an expand-ed archive across time and space, prompting other resonances and opening out unexpected pathways through an archive of the image in time and space.’
—Griselda Pollock

"To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking. So in order to become its echo, in a way I have to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence."
—Maurice Blanchot

"13. Dum spectas fugio. As you look at me, I flee."
—Inscription on a sundial

“(...) I mean to say that a sentence is a monster, by which I mean that speaking can be a momentary help.”
—Peter Handke

"Latif al-Ani’s images form part of a defence and an illustration of Iraqi culture—in all its diversity and complexity—that resonate cruelly today: the Mesopotamian antiquities and traditional dwellings, the hubbub of marketplaces and urban pastimes."
—Catherine David

Did anyone imagine that this cannibalistic story of warlords would lead us to the land of nightmares?

Lambda’s exemplary power lies in the internal structure and organization and in the building’s distinct external form. The jury concludes that this is what gives the museum the real possibility of becoming a testimony to its own time.