Throughout his career, conceptual artist and Northwestern professor Michael Rakowitz has used simple provocations to reveal the complexities of human relationships. Rakowitz is the son of Jewish parents, an American father and an Iraqi-American mother, and grew up in Great Neck, New York, on Long Island. His maternal grandparents fled Iraq in 1946, no longer feeling safe there when British colonial forces withdrew after World War II and political upheaval ensued. Much of Rakowitz’s work centers around the absence of anything “Iraqi” in the U.S. that isn’t related to war, and his sculptures, performances, drawings, and illustrations in some ways act as a remedy to that—they’re substitutes for missing cultural context. “Michael Rakowitz: Backstroke of the West,” now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, features ten of his most iconic artworks and a new stop-motion animation piece. The show is filled with stories, conversations with strangers and new friends, and research; it’s a demonstration of the human desire to manifest memories.

Cultural objects also figure heavily in Rakowitz’s work. In The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2006-ongoing), he and a team of studio assistants reconstructed hundreds of the missing, stolen, or destroyed objects from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad. The human figures, daggers, vases, and other objects were sculpted to scale out of Arabic-language newspapers and food packaging; to approximate their size and shape, Rakowitz relied on Interpol-alert descriptions, research, and photographs compiled by archeologists at the Oriental Institute. The use of detritus to make Iraqi objects that may never be repatriated—to date there’s no stable infrastructure for the artifacts to be returned, catalogued, and properly cared for—becomes a comment on the failure of the U.S. military to protect Iraq’s centuries-old cultural heritage during the war.

Through 3/4/18. Tue 10 AM-9 PM, Wed-Thu 10 AM-5 PM, Fri 10 AM-9 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM Museum of Contemporary Art 220 E. Chicago 312-280-2660mcachicago.org $12, $7 students and seniors, free kids 12 and under and members of the military, free for Illinois residents on Tuesdays