At the Sackler Gallery, take a virtual-reality tour of cities ravaged by ISIS and war
“Age Old Cities” at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery examines three ancient Middle Eastern cities that have recently been ravaged by war: Mosul, Iraq, and Palmyra in Syria were nearly destroyed by the Islamic State between 2014 and 2017, while large portions of Aleppo suffered heavily during the Syrian civil war.
The Sackler’s first primarily virtual exhibition, “Age Old Cities” was organized by the Arab World Institute in Paris, where it opened in 2018, in partnership with UNESCO. It features four large-scale 3-D digital projections, each lasting several minutes, revealing the extent of these cities’ devastation. Almost entirely devoid of people, the animations digitally stitch together tens of thousands of photographs taken from 2017 to 2018 — both by drone and from the ground — along with archival images of some of the sites before their destruction.
The projections were created by the French start-up Iconem, which specializes in digitizing endangered sites, both to record them for posterity and to promote their conservation...
In the Mosul projection, the camera swirls almost vertiginously, gliding over the flattened buildings, burned-out cars and piles of debris that made up much of the cityscape after it was reclaimed from the Islamic State. The 12th-century Great Mosque of al-Nuri — once famous for its leaning minaret — is shown in almost complete ruin after the Islamic State dynamited it in 2017. The projection then morphs into a ghostly 3-D re-creation of the mosque before its destruction, the architectural rendering rising from the rubble around it.