in thailand where 12 boys and their football coach have been trapped for ten days. a doctor and nurse were among a group of divers who have reached the group, which was cut off by rising floodwaters. the authorities say they will not risk the boys‘ safety with a hasty evacuation. the former malaysians prime minister is expected to be charged in the next few hours following the loss of billions of dollars from the investment fund imdb. england are through to the world cup quarter finals for the first time since 2006. they beat colombia 4—3 on penalties. they'll face sweden on saturday at the samara arena. that's all. stay with bbc world news. now on bbc news, it's hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur.

the best art helps us to see and feel in new ways. it can challenge and provoke. my guest today has made it his mission to test the boundaries of what we think of as art. michael rakowitz uses sculpture, installation and site specific experience to transmit a vision which reflects his iraqi—jewish heritage and preoccu pations, which range from war to family to food. he's won plaudits around the world. what does his work tell us about the state we're in? michael rakowitz, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you, stephen, thanks for having me. it's a great pleasure to have you. it seems to me, in your work, there is a duality. you are an american kid, stroke american man, yet you seem intensely conscious of your heritage that comes — certainly from your grandmother's side — from iraq. why is that duality so important to you? well, it became important when it went from being something that was so normal to being something that seemed so paradoxical for people. i grew up in a house where my grandmother and my grandfather on my mum's side and my mum had come from iraq via bombay to the united states in1946, and i grew up in a house where it wasn't at all odd to hear my mother and my grandmother talking in arabic in the kitchen

and to smell the spices that were being used when they were making kibbeh or mashi, which is dolma in the iraquewish dialect. and to have that emanate into the living room where, you know, sometimes there were family gatherings where there were songs that came from the iraquewish community, and the melange that existed there at the time was that the musicians werejewish and the singers were coming from koranic tradition, from the islamic community. and so it was like a bridge that i didn't realise i was hearing but it sounded so normal, it felt so normal. and then by the time i was 16 or 17 years old, i was more aware of who i was as a person in the world and where politics — and when the drums started to beat towards war in 1991, i became acutely aware of the fact

that the place my grandparents fled from was about to be bombed by the place they fled to. that's a crucial experience for you, when iraq became the enemy. saddam hussein became the hate figure for all of america and the country that you'd known through your grandparents and your mum as a place of heritage, of language, of food, of all of these positive warm feelings, suddenly was defined to most americans as somewhere hateful and frightening. yeah, and my mother saw that happening right in front of us, and i remember seeing the first live real—time images of iraq that i've ever seen in my life, which were green tinted, coming from the night vision on cnn. they were pictures of buildings that were being blown to bits, that i was never going to be able to visit. as we were watching this, my mother turned to my brothers and i and said, "you know, there's no iraqi

restaurants in new york?" it was like the riddle of the sphinx. years later, i understood that she was pointing out that iraq was not visible in the us beyond oil and war. and we'll get to iraqi restaurants in new york later. sure. because although you're an artist, one of your installations was indeed inside a restaurant and was all about food and connections between food and culture and art. but we don't want to raise that here. sure. i'm just intrigued, as you talk about those memories of your grandparents and your mum, you're positing it very much in terms of the arabic language, in terms of a rich culture and food. you're not talking aboutjewishness, and yet, they were iraquews. was it that they felt more in a way more rooted in their country and the culture of their country, iraq, than they felt in theirjewishness? i think that was a period of time that existed, and it's one of those periods of time that i tried to wield not as a nostalgia in the work that i do but as a blueprint, going forward, of how things can be. because it was, and it wasn't so long ago. they always talk about how iraq, how baghdad actually, was kind of like a jewish city

in the 30s and then the 405, and you even had the city shutting down on friday before sunset because of the sabbath. and that kind of relationship between people, regardless of faith, was something that i think a lot of iraqis, whether they were ofjewish or muslim or christian descent, really held dear. and nationalist programmes can complicate that. and that notion of an ancient culture where people could come together and share experience, it's very central to a lot of your work. i want to now fast forward from your memories of childhood and upbringing to the reason you're in the uk, in london right now, which is to unveil the spectacular public artwork which has perhaps the most prominent public art piece in all of the country.

and we can see an image of it. now, it's a recreation of a mythical assyrian lamassu, which is the sort half man, half bull or lion. it has wings, it's a mythical creature. and you've been given that spot on trafalgar squarem on the plinth. tell me the origins of this piece of work. because it has ancient mythical origins, and yet it's something you've made out of trash. exactly. well, the project is an extension of one i began about 12 years ago in my studio, with my assistants, which endeavoured to reconstruct the 7000 artefacts that are listed as missing or stolen or status unknown in the aftermath of the looting of the iraq museum in 2003. so i began there and i enlisted the detritus or the cultural visibility of arab communities around the united states, where, beyond oil and war, where do you see it?

well, you see it on the food packaging, it's in arabic and english. and you see it in the arab english newspapers that are given away for free to the refugees. and that extraordinary thing, the lamassu, is made, i believe, of something like 10,500 old cans of date syrup. exactly. and date syrup, there's a long, convoluted story that i could tell you about my experience with dates and reopening my grandfather's import export company to import iraqi dates. but i found out that iraqi dates are the best in the world. there's over 600 different varieties, and the date palm suffered, alongside the people and the culture. so at the end of the iran iraq war, what was a 30 million strong date palm industry throughout the country was reduced to about half that, and at the end of the iraq war, the estimates were something like 3 million. to you, is this artwork optimistic, in the sense that you could be

saying to the world, "look, so—called islamic state or other extreme nihilist organisations can never destroy the idea behind these ancient artefacts"? you could be saying that or you could be, on the contrary, be rather bleak and be saying, you know, "they've destroyed something so ancient and all i can put forward now is a memory of it, a ghost of it that's made out of trash." so is it optimistic or is it bleak? ithink, you know, one of the things — it comes back to food. iraqi food is so great because it's hamid halu, it's sweet and sour. so if you make a kibbeh, that's sour. you want your stew to be sweet and vice—versa. so things are held in tension. right. so i absolutely believe that these desires, not only in my work but across the world, where you've seen people now, like this wonderful young artist up in the north of iraq who started to reconstruct artefacts also from plaster, after da esh started to destroy things —

this is a good intention, this is a good impulse — to want to rebuild. but i am saying that the past is the past, like you can't 3—d print the dna of the people that are killed alongside the artefacts because the artefacts always perish alongside people. and so, in some way... i just wonder if there was some anger in you when, for example, the international media made such a storm over the destruction of the wonderful remains in palmyra, also, one could talk about nimrud in iraq, nineveh as well, of course. ever time one of the most historic pieces was destroyed, or places was defiled, there was a storm of outrage which seemed to, in a sense, get under the skin of people more than the daily toll of deaths of human beings. was that angering you? initially, when i started this

long—term project back in 2006 to reconstruct things, it was about a certain kind of anger that you can walk through galleries in new york and not know that we were living in a war culture. and i was wondering when the outrage around lost iraqi artefacts would turn into outrage around lost iraqi lives. but at the same time, i'm not a psychologist, but i do wonder where people put their mourning. you know, i wonder where they put their outrage into symbolic things. art often is about the kind of indirect reference to something that we're all feeling together, and what was useful about the outrage around the looting of the iraq museum was that it didn'tjust localise the problem, it wasn't an iraqi tragedy — it was an iraqi tragedy, but it was also a human tragedy. this was our cultural heritage that was shared, and if you can put people

on the track towards thinking way, that it's something we share, then there are all these other opportunities about sharing this sense of loss in other directions. will you everfinish this mammoth project of yours? because i mean, i know the thing you're calling the invisible enemy should not exist. will you ever get that done? you're only on about number 800 of 8000, i think. it's a lifetime task. that will outlive me and my studio. that's kind of the point, to show that history can't be fully reconstructed and we can't do it without everyone being involved in it. there're a community that has arisen, like i said, of people who talk about 3—d printing, and there are conversations to be had there, but i also don't want it to be simply something that is fetishising only the artefacts, that like oh, we can just rebuild palmyra. but like you said earlier, you can't bring khaled al—asaad, this amazing archaeologist that protected not only the...

he was the 82—year—old archaeologist who was actually executed... a tragedy, tragic. ..by daesh on the site of his own pride and joy — which was safeguarding, being the guardian of palmyra. he wouldn't give up the location of certain items and he wouldn't give up the location of certain people. this is somebody who understood what was happening. when books burn, people burn. you know, we've seen that throughout history. i want to widen this out now to think about some of your other work as well. would it be fair to say that that formative experience you had as a teenager watching the first iraq war with the us involvement in iraq, and then watching the second iraq war, with the us actually occupying iraq after 2002—2003 — has that turned you into an anti—war artist? oh, i don't think i was ever a pro—war artist, um... no, but now, would you say it's one of your driving forces to deliver messages through your art that are about —

i don't want to put words in your mouth, negativeimpacts of war? i think so. i mean, it's notjust that i do with the work. i think i do a lot of things, hopefully, with the work. if i think about my long—term engagements with iraqis and with iraq war veterans back in the united states, it's looking at the way in which both the soldier and the refugee experience, the dehumanisation of that experience of combat and occupation. yeah, i mean, you have got these extraordinary... i don't know what to call them, actually, and it will be interesting to know what you call them. you couldn't call them pieces of art, they're more experiential. you've got this one project in chicago where you have iraqis who have fled from iraq, for all the reasons we have just discussed, they are cooks and chefs, they serve food, they also have helping them us military

veterans who fought in iraq and they are the sous chefs and the waiters. the food is iraqi and it is delivered to people in chicago. first of all, that is fascinating, but is it art? well, i'm less interested in what people call things. for me, it's art because it exists in this space of kind of weirdness and impossibility. it actually is not a business model that people run to if they were thinking of opening up a restaurant. you don't want to open up you restaurant and call it enemy kitchen, you know, but i think that business can be good art. but the point is, do you think you want people to go

there because they want the food, to treat itjust as a restaurant or a kitchen? or do you want to go there because you want them to be open to a kind of artistic, sensual, sensory, experience that's much wider than just food? of course. that latter excites me more than the former, but what's been incredible is that we've had folks who have come up to this food truckjust kind of expecting to buy a sandwich, a kabob sandwich. and then all of a sudden, they're realising that the person that is speaking to them is speaking in english and then the person in the back is yelling at somebody else in arabic, and they start to realise in this close proximity, you have the perceived enemies on both sides of the conflict. and bringing it back to the beginning of our conversation, i believe they're using some

of your grandmother's recipes? they are, they are. so there's a distribution that — we're casting a wide net now, kurdish recipes, assyrian recipes, but all within what was iraq. definitely i'm getting the sense with you that art and food are very much mixed together. of course. because not just that fascinating experiential art but there's this extraordinary thing in new york where you took over a rather posh restaurant for a while. actually, i think maybe you're still doing it from time to time, are you? no, no, no, that was a... it was a one—off. you took over the posh restaurant, served iraqi food, but not only that, you served on plates that you's specifically requisitioned through ebay from saddam hussein's family household. they were so much a part of the saddam hussein story that the iraqi government wanted them back. they were amazing. so what is it about food that speaks to you in such a broad way, a sort of artistic, experiential way? just as a point of clarification, which is interesting in answering your question, i was collaborating with a chef at this restaurant called park avenue and the chef's name was kevin lasko, and what we did with that project was really kind of look at the way that a menu happens. and a menu is presented to you almost like, almost like the accession cards in a museum now that tells you exactly what kind of pigment is used and so,

the menu tells you where your rugelach comes from, it tells you where your meat is harvested from. it's a way of making the dinerfeel good, and i wanted to make the dinerfeel bad. so iraqi date syrup in the united states hasn't been labelled as "product of iraq" for years because it's been impossible to get it through customs without event, and so it says "product of lebanon" or weirdly enough, "product of netherlands", where i've never seen a date palm grow. and to be able to actually reveal, you know, on the menu that there was a dish that was made with iraqi dates syrup was part of it, so for me, it came back to not only yes, the culinary experience being like something artistic. and ifeel like when i am making kibbeh, i feel like a sculptor. when i'm making kabob, i feel like a sculptor. but it was also about taking that kind of like

way of enticing the viewer, enticing the reader. there's a playfulness in you, a sort of provocativeness and a playfulness, and it works on many different levels. ijust wonder, and i want to bring in a second image, i just wonder whether sometimes you're at risk of taking that playfulness to a place where it can be seen as disrespect. sure. this image is taken from, i think something that you put on in london a while ago. a show that in many ways made comments on saddam hussein's reign in iraq and this very famous, notorious symbol of his power in iraq. he had his own arms and hands cast in bronze for this sort of victory arch, which of course the real one, which i have walked under in baghdad, it had these vast, monumental sabres in both hands. you, with your playfulness, have turned it into light sabres from star wars. now, some might look at that and say

given everything we know about saddam hussein's iraq, that's disrespect. sure, sure. well, i know that i work with difficult material from time to time and, to be honest, this is the most uncomfortable sculpture i've ever made because... not because of what i used to make it, but because the original is alsojust so, i mean, hard for me to get down with. you know, like, it's his hands blown up a0 times. it's using the melted down metals from munitions from the iranians, that the iraqis... it's the personification of his tyranny, really. yes, it is, and it's narcissism. it's... you know, these kinds of monuments exist everywhere but, but you know, when i was on ebay, and what really brought me to ebay first was the fact that mesopotamian artefacts were showing up there after the looting,

i wanted to know what iraq didn't want back, and one of the things i found online was a helmet that was being sold by a member of the us armed forces that was based in mosul, in the 101st airborne division, that was cast directly from darth vader, darth vader's helmet, and it belonged to the fedayeen saddam, and when the soldier... they really used these darth vader helmets? they used these. they used them. and so, then the soldier asked the locals what this was about, and he explained that saddam and uday were huge fans, and after all of this kind research that i did ifound out that saddam was a collector of an american artist named rowena morrill, and rowena morrill‘s mentor was an artist named boris vallejo and boris vallejo designed a poster for the empire strikes back that has saddam... that has darth vader holding two light sabres over his head. it's clunky story but somebody‘s has got to tell it because it's true, you know. i've interviewed a lot of artists on hardtalk, but i've never interviewed one who intrigues me in the way that you do because most artists clearly,

you know, have a commercial impetus toward most of their work. they end up with a thing which can be put in a gallery, bought and sold, it can be moved around the world and invested with value, but so much of what you create can't really fit in any of those categories. for example, we're talking about the restaurant in new york or the enemy kitchen in chicago. these are experiences but, but they only exist in their own time and place. you can't sell ‘em. no. you know, you couldn't put them up to auction at sotheby‘s. frankly, you can't really make money or make a living out of them.

no. so, are you a commercial artist or not? i wouldn't consider myself one, no. it's not the place that i come from. i come from working in public space, i love working the city, i love working with architecture and i love working with the people living inside those buildings. however, there is a kind of component to my projects that really does look not at the market per se, but at the way that markets emerge as a sight specific place. so it was the existence of an antiquities market that allowed for the iraq museum to be looted in the first place and for a lot of people, those artefacts were the ticket out of the country. so with that kind of market, being where it was, and thinking about the contemporary art market and the fact that those things do intersect sometimes, you go to most collectors‘s houses that collect contemporary art and they'll have an antiquity they may or may not want to talk to about. that's an interesting take on the art market, but i want to end by taking us back to the beginning, which was that discussion that you're so passionate about, about iraq, family and memory. it amazes me that despite your

preoccupation with your heritage and what it's given you, you've never been to iraq. why? well, my family left because they felt like they had to leave and they were heartbroken. but you could go now. i could go, of course, i mean, and that to me, i think about that all the time. i think about, you know, going back and i have that privilege of the american passport, but over the past 12 years, i've been working with a lot of iraqi refugees as well in my projects and they can't go back and they're injordan, they're in the united states, they‘ re in canada, and we've forged close relationships with each other, and in a way, i feel like that distance has almost become like a material in my work. but they said to me, "i'll tell you how you are going to go back, we're going to go back and we're going to invite you to visit us." and that's how i would do it.

and when you do it, we want to talk to you again. inshallah. but for now, michael rakowitz, thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you, stephen, i appreciate it. hello there. the weather story across the uk of late has been pretty dull and boring — we had to go to the football for some excitement, haven't we? in fact, yesterday, hardly a cloud in the sky again actoss much of the country, as depicted by north wales, but some subtle differences as we go through the day today. there'll be a little more cloud around for many of us and there may even be a chance of a shower. why? well, the high pressure isjust weakening its grip a little and it's

allowing this plume of showery rain to push up from the south—west. they'll be very hit and miss and not everywhere will see them, but there is a risk of a few of those, and at the same time the north—easterly breeze will drag in more cloud across northern england and eastern england throughout the day. so here, that could just have an effect of this feel of the temperature, but let's take a look at these showers in a little more detail, circulating around that south—west area, but we might see one or two just pushing up into southern england as well. so that could be pretty tricky if you are heading off to wimbledon. there is a small chance — only a very small chance — of catching a shower but it is certainly worth bearing in mind. i suspect there will be a little more cloud around and that, for some of you, may come as welcome news. so this is sw19 with cloudy skies overhead. just an outside chance of a shower, perhaps this is over—reading a little bit. you really will be unlucky if you do catch one, but it's worth bearing in mind, particularly in comparison to the weather that we've seen of late. but in terms of the feel of things, despite a little more cloud and the risk of a shower, temperatures are still slightly

above the average for the time of year, with 21—24 degrees. now, look at this as we move out of wednesday into thursday, we have got a weather front showing its hand in the far north—west. now, this will be interesting — not much in the way of rain on it but it is going to introduce a wind direction from a north—westly and behind it, something a little bit fresher. so certainly on thursday, more cloud for northern ireland and for much of scotland, and a noticeable difference here to the feel of the weather. further south and east, we've still got that warmth and we lose the risk of few showers so temperatures are going to respond again back up to 29 degrees, as opposed to 15 or 19 degrees in the far north—west. now that weather front will drift out of the way and then high pressure building again from the south—west so things are going to quieten down as we move towards the weekend and if you do not believe me, let's have a look at the weekend story. friday and saturday, temperatures building and the sunshine set to return, highs of 29—30.

take care. i'm sharanjit leyl in singapore. the headlines: 12 boys and their football coach trapped in a flooded cave in thailand have received their first food and medical treatment for 10 days. this is still a huge operation, with large numbers of people coming in to help an operation which has achieved a remarkable success, but still doesn't have an answer as to how they are going to get those boys out of the caves. and i'm 0lly foster in moscow, at the world cup, where the quarter—final line—up is now complete, england taking their place in the last eight with a penalty shootout win against colombia. i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme: former malaysian prime minister najib razak is due to be charged in the next few hours under anti—corruption laws.