Born in Baghdad in 1966, Mahmoud Obaidi is an Iraqi-Canadian multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and artists’ books. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1990 before relocating to Canada, where he earned an MFA from the University of Guelph and pursued further studies in New Media at Ryerson University and in Film Production at the HIF Film Academy in Los Angeles.
Working across painting, installation, sculpture, video, print, new media, and artist’s books, Obaidi engages material cultures of conflict, migration, and governance to reconstruct the infrastructures of memory and power. He mobilizes found and repurposed objects, mechanized components, archival fragments, and manufactured artefacts to interrogate bureaucratic systems, displacement trajectories, and the visual languages of control.
Obaidi has presented solo exhibitions at major institutions including Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2016); Qatar Museums Gallery-Katara, Doha (2016-2017); and Meem Gallery, Dubai (2023). His work has been featured in international exhibitions such as the 15th Istanbul Biennial (2017); 56th Biennale di Venezia collateral event In the Eye of the Thunderstorm (2015); the 57th Biennale di Venezia (Grenada Pavilion, 2017); Modernism and Iraq at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York (2009); and Iraqi Artists in Exile at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston. Additional institutional presentations include the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2012), and the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha (2013).
His works are held in the collections of the British Museum (London), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha), Sharjah Art Museum (Sharjah), Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts (Amman), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul (Quebec), Museum of Modern Art (Baghdad), Nabu Museum (El-Heri, Lebanon), and the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (Beirut).
