Ebon, amoeba-like lesions and pockmarked, sienna-colored earth are incised into the coarse folds of Risan’s books. Larger areas of bleeding color dotted with pictographs enclose these wounds. In Al Mutanabbi Street (2007), ripped Arabic-language texts are collaged, burned, and cut, then painted with light washes that soak their pages. Black tire tracks run across the surfaces of conjoined leaflets and printed sheets, matching charred sections distributed among the debris. Created as a series of collapsible panels that rest in a shallow box, the handmade volume documents the bombing of Baghdad’s legendary bookselling district. Killing over two-dozen people and destroying numerous bookshops and stalls, the explosion is said to have severed one of the few remaining outlets of the city’s intellectual culture at the time. Combining painting, collage, and décollage, the mixed-media work serves as a stark reminder of the extent to which the receptacles of Iraq’s cultural landscape have absorbed its protracted catastrophe.