By Juliet Highet.

A world away from the papyrus marshes of southern Iraq, ancient sanctuary for dissidents and now under desperate ecological threat as their waters are drained away, a cosmopolitan crowd gathered at a private view at one of London's newer art galleries, the Soni in Connaught Street, dedicated to exhibiting the contemporary art of Asia and the Arab world.

Educated banter swirled around largely graphic works of poetry and protest, whose titles resonated to the sounds of antiquity, and whose forms recalled the encrusted patina of time. Marsh Eye was the title of the exhibition; Rashad Salim the artist.

The graphic works, each of them unique monotypes, had titles like Arabesque Om/Ain, Ancient Gourd, Om of Healing, Marsh Lights, Afa and Anfish (mythical marsh creatures) and Deluge. "I have been developing an offset process which accumulates traces of images, rather like manual offset, and which emerge like prints," Salim told me.

Marsh Eye also showed wooden and metal sculptures with titles like Family on the Move and Figure at the Edge of Hope. "I have recently produced a set of wood sculptures relating to my experience of the marshes, with images like the crescent moon and Sumerian cylinder seal stamps, which originated in southern Iraq, and which are evident everywhere in marsh architecture."

Born in Khartoum in 1957, the son of an Iraqi father and German mother, Salim's childhood was spent in China, Sweden, Libya and Iraq. He swears that his German persona forms his reality and that the contemporary artists who have most influenced him are German. "There's a sense of expressive urgency and opposites about German culture - a strong sense of order and reactionary materialism balanced by a sensitive searching for soul."

But it is Salim's Iraqi identity that preoccupies - one might almost say obsesses - him, although he believes Arabs should look towards the East for inspiration and values. "We should re-connect with that larger segment of history and peoples and be aware of how much we are being hypnotised by the West, that we are forgetting a lot. We are more and more enamoured of the West, controlled by it, so that we are losing our own seductiveness."

Before obtaining a Diploma in Graphics from the Institute of Graphics, Baghdad, in 1980, Salim joined the crew of the Tigris Expedition and the construction team of the Sumerian reed boat, led by Tor Heyerdal. With them he travelled the ancient trade routes between Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and the Red Sea. It was a valuable experience. "We learnt how to develop traditional technologies in a contemporary way," he explained.

Salim is passionate about placing the looming loss of the Iraqi marshland, and therefore of its people, in the public eye. He believes that the present devastation of the marshes is linked to the global loss of indigenous ways of life. "All over the world we're looking for signs. Many scientists point to potential calamity with the consumer-oriented society that we have, our internal combustion.

"The marshes are a place where you find a balance between man and nature, materials and needs. It's an extremely harmonious culture, as are most indigenous ones. Even though in Iraq people have tended to leave rural areas for urban life, in the marshes people have stayed or returned. It's a hard life, but a rich one.

"Sumerian civilisation began in this region, and it was the birthplace of Abraham and Noah. Indeed there are indications in Sumerian texts that Noah was told to convert his house into a boat made of papyrus reeds."

Salim added that the marshes are the only sanctuary and place of refuge in southern Iraq. "So a lot of soldiers who had left the military went to the marshes. It's also a sanctuary in the sense that there is vegetal cover in which to hide and from which to attack. Most of the people who remain in the marshes are on the run."

The destruction of the marshes goes on apace, the water-level dropping continually; already the land area has diminished by 30 per cent. "The water-level of the Euphrates had started to decline prior to the Iran-Iraq War; but now it's total blasphemy the way the water is being drained out." Salim pulled no punches: "The object is to destroy the ecology of the area. If it were a government acting on behalf of the people it would be protecting the water rights. But the marshes have been drained, raided, poisoned, gassed, napalmed. An ancient seed culture is being destroyed. As an act of cultural protest and resistance, Rashad Salim together with Marsh Arab refugees, plans to build a traditional papyrus reed platform in the shape of Ain, an eye, in what remains of the marshlands of southern Iraq. This platform or raft will be visible when viewed aerially from passing planes. The technology to build the Ain platform is of course that of the Marsh Arabs, resonating curiously with the legacy of Noah's Ark.

At first it was envisaged as a secret operation, but now it is going ahead openly, planned to be launched in March '99.

The project has attracted international media attention, with a documentary proposed as part of World Artists for Tibet 1998. Southern Iraq and Tibet hold uniquely significant positions in the world as spiritual and cultural symbols; and both are sanctuaries under invasion. Rashad Salim has worked with refugees before and insisted: "I am not a political person; I am not affiliated to any party; I am not militant; I am an artist. In any other country there would have been armed resistance. That is not helpful at this time in the marshes. So by our endeavour, we are offering cultural resistance."