Who Decides Evil? is a counter-factual historical and cultural site that commemorates Saddam Hussein, former President of Iraq, as a hero. The installation makes use of sculpture, archival prints, and memorabilia of the former leader to pose questions about war, tyranny, and leadership.

   The majority of my process was dual-headed; a focus on craft and a focus on content. Content
continued to evolve as I had to focus on how the final install would look aesthetically, but also keeping the installation curated.
    I used each zone of my installation to talk about specific aspects of Iraq and Hussein’s reign. These aspects culminated in leadership, diplomacy, policy, military prowess, and personal life. This framework made it easier for me to curate images and artifacts for the installation. Curated images included editorial press images, photos of weapons, and images of Saddam at events, like the Arab Summit. Editorial images added an extra layer because they were labeled with Western media captions. Curating artifacts involved looking online for memorabilia specific to Saddam-era Iraq
and other generic military objects.
    As for the focus on craft, I created 3D artifacts. I first modeled a key given to President Hussein by the City of Detroit. This artifact grounds the project a lot personally to me. Not only was the gift from my home city, but it was specifically given to Hussein by the Chaldean Church. The creation of the this artifact took looking at historical precedence to find a design language that embodied this era and this style of diplomatic recognition. Modeling and 3D printing took a number of iterations to get the right amount of detail and the proper size for display. Once the design was finalized, I finished the key with sanding and coating it in gold leaf. This, along with a nice stand and shadow box gave the artifact the final language needed to give the idea that this is a precious artifact.
    This projects use of prints was partially made possible thanks to the Iraqi Print Archive . This archive works to preserve Iraq’s print media from the late twentieth century. Scans of prints provided by the archive were adapted to fit the context of the museum, most notably as book covers. While this installation was social commentary, it also helped serve the Iraqi Print Archive’s mission of preserving the print culture of Iraq by operating as a physical manifestation of the archive.
    The most ambitious artifact I constructed was the Babylonian/Assyrian style sculptural relief. This project used the painting from Iraqi painter, Faeq Hassan, and adapted it to a 3D sculpture. I used a number of tools in the making of this work, and it required a rigorous testing phase. First, I uploaded the image to a number of CNC softwares to see what rough displacement map I would get. A software called OKSculpt ended up resulting in the best displacement map. From here this map was taken into Photoshop to clean up details and fix distortions. This phase is where testing was crucial. Although I could sample the relief digitally, testing the relief into real life gave me a much clearer picture of what the final relief would result in. After testing different settings, reworking details, and sourcing the right materials, I fabricated the final rendition.