His practice is rooted in questions of identity, memory and the digital mediation of reality, drawing on archival material to create new forms of connection with the past. Developed through the artist’s practice-based PhD research at the Glasgow School of Art, House of Memory transforms photographs and oral testimonies from the Iraq Photo Archive into an engaging virtual environment. Rather than treating the archive as a static repository, the work approaches it as a living space in which memory is actively reconstructed and shared.  

Through a 15-minute VR experience, visitors encounter the voices and life stories of Iraqis telling their memories in the country they remember from the 1970s. Iraq is told as a place marked by freedom, cultural richness and everyday intimacy, reframed through nostalgia and displacement. Combining immersive technology with documentary storytelling, the project opens up a rarely represented perspective on Iraqi history and diaspora experience.  

The work resonates on multiple levels: through Al-Rawi’s layered cultural identity, which echoes Brussels’ plurality of identities, and through the project’s sensitive engagement with oral and photographic archives as spaces of transmission, participation and remembrance.