'The invisible enemy should not exist' at Williams College

Around 879 B.C., the brutal Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II ordered a self-aggrandizing palace built in what is now called Nimrud in Iraq. He had the walls lined with large figural reliefs carved in stone. Time and neglect protected these for over 2,500 years until rediscovered in the 1800s by a British archaeologist, and then many of the reliefs were scattered around the world.

The remainder were local treasures until they were bulldozed and at least partially blown up by ISIS in 2015.

Williams College has two of the original alabaster reliefs acquired in 1851, and artist Michael Rakowitz was inspired to create a response to the current complex situation. For "The invisible enemy should not exist (Room Z, Northwest Palace of Nimrud)," he has created a full-scale model of one of the palace's rooms, but with a contemporary twist: for the destroyed originals, he selectively, faithfully created colorful, 21st-century replacements using bits of plastic packaging from what the curator Lisa Dorin calls "Middle Eastern" foods as well as newspaper fragments "available to diasporic populations."

The results are beautiful figural reliefs of their own, in bold new colors but taking on the original shapes of mythical creatures, all with wings. The originals had horizontal lines of text right across the figures (a bold visual move from our perspective) and Rakowitz does the same with his. But he goes further by using plastic and paper shards that integrate incidental words that form a secondary calligraphic texture.

The college's two Neo-Assyrian originals are accessible in the next room, and it's worth going back and forth a couple of times to appreciate the implications. The fact Rakowitz has chosen not to make, say, plaster copies that would closely resemble the originals has no explanation but it lets the work speak for the...