Alexandra Rose Howland

Buried in the heart of Georgia sits a Soviet era Ritz Carlton. Equal parts Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shining, Hotel Georgia is a nearly abandoned hotel visited by just a handful of guests per year and maintained by 3 employees, all of whom hold IDP (Internally Displaced Person) status from the Abkhazia Conflict in 1992.

“Leave and Let Us Go” is the culmination of Alexandra Rose Howland's photographic work across Iraq over the last five years. Her work seeks to expand our understanding of geopolitical events by offering firsthand accounts and personal perspectives. In this installation shot, we see a small selection of the roughly 350,000 images and videos Alexandra Rose Howland collected from people across Iraq, rearranged and narrated through the artist's interaction to present a modern and diversified view on daily life in a war-torn country.

Alexandra Rose Howland’s series is part of our exhibition “Foam Talent 2022” that is on view at The Cube in Eschborn until May 14. Check our website for more information.

Alexandra Rose Howland, from the series “Leave and Let Us Go” © Alexandra Rose Howland. Installation view at The Cube, © Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Photo: Robert Schittko

Robert Schittko

Leave and Let Us Go
_____________________________
At 14, we sat in a classroom and imagined the end of the wars.
Planning our futures, we sat and we laughed. We dreamt of what we could do and who we could be.
We tumbled out of school.
She collapsed, hit by a silent bullet.
She lay on the ground.
She bled all her blood.
All her thoughts soaked into the earth around her.
Our futures slipped out of her eyes, lost in the heat beating down on us.
I knew then it would never be so simple in my homeland.
-
Breathing became something to hope for. The conflict doubled.
My neighbours, my friends, my families were killed.
My uncle abducted.
The head of my cousin’s husband delivered to our doorstep.
The charred faces of our brothers.
-
They threatened to kill my father if I did not cover my head, so I stole my mother’s veil and I watched.
I watched them kill the innocent people of my home. From a hole in the wall, I watched them while I studied.
I watched them as they took one after the other.
I watched one of them plant a small seed in front of my house and I dreamt they watered it with the blood of the innocent.
The deep red flowing into the roots surrounding my home.
The seeds of evil soaking all around us.
-
Fear has haunted me like a shadow from the first moments of war.
It clings to me like a lost child, nameless and with no identity, filling my heart. Sometimes I pity it and give it everything I have.
I never part with it.
It took the form of a wayward missile, as if wanting to play hide and seek.
Once exploding in our street and once in a nearby house.
It matured when we fled and it confronted me sternly when my uncle was martyred. I carried a charred piece of it the size of my palm to place in his grave.
-
Today my fear has grown into branches that feed from my soul.
I fear breaking news and protestors being killed.
I fear mothers' faces as they rush to embrace the remains of their sons.
I fear our conversations of migration and the thought of saying goodbye.
I fear for my family and for the ones I love in such a monotonous, boring and automatic way,
I fear.
-Excerpt from I Dream of My Homeland by

LEAVE AND LET US GO