This is the story I know, and also not the story I know.
How can a mother put a baby in a basket and throw them into a river?
I look at at this and I see this very complicated dynamic.
Where am I from? Where is home?
You feel he's ready for a fall.
It's like when you open a door and you don't know what's going to be behind.
I was born in Iraq in Baghdad.
My father passed away when I was two years old.
And our mother looked after us from childhood.
Growing up there, it was fun.
We used to play on the street all the time with the neighbours' kids.
When I started going to primary school,
it was then when the war started between
Iraq and Iran.
Instead of singing songs and hymns,
we used to have raising the flag
and we had a soldier shooting with the AK47 just to make the children
get used to the sound of bullets and the sound of bombs.
We used to see, every other day, coffins
of soldiers that were killed in the war coming. From our neighbourhood.
So when my older brother became closer
to an age where he had to do his documents and register for the army,
my mother, she did whatever she can just to save her children.
She sat down with us and she told us how it is going to be, that we are leaving.
The bible story tells us that a time came
when the Pharaoh gave an order for
every son born to the Hebrews to be executed.
The story of Moses comes when his mother, out of her fear for the safety of her son,
she puts him in a basket and puts him down the River Nile.
The biggest thing that I get out of this picture is the mother's love.
By putting him in a basket and in the river,
at least, maybe she thought, 'Even far from me, as long as he lives, it's okay.'
And it resonates with my mother's decision to take us out.
There were rumours of many families trying
to flee Iraq and they were persecuted and executed for that.
But she decided, 'Yes,
no matter what difficulties we're going to face going out, we'll face it together.
I'll try my best to save my children.
Because I know here, if we stay, they will die.'
Six days the journey took.
It was moving across mountains.
We arrived at the Iranian border.
It was a very brave decision.
It's heroic.
It was a story in the 1700s and it is a story today as well.
You see how desperate parents are when
they're putting a child into a dinghy and sending them away.
Nothing changes in it.
We're still the same people.
We dress differently, we do our hairstyles differently, but we are the same people.
The story has lived 3000 years and it will live forever,
I believe.
You can't overstate how important this
narrative is within the Jewish tradition.
This child is saved and by that twist
of biblical fate, saved by Pharaoh's daughter.
Of course, we all know that Moses will grow up to become the leader
of the Israelites and go back and defeat Pharaoh.
This is the story I know
and also not the story I know.
I think when I first stood in front of it
in the National Gallery, it didn't feel necessarily like my imagination.
If I were going to paint this scene, it's not what I would do.
These women are dressed in finest silk brocades,
they are very, very white.
This is not a scene that's taking place in ancient Egypt with those people.
It's a scene that has been interpreted and transplanted
into English history.
And we know, of course,
that this painting was commissioned by Charles I to hang in Greenwich.
And in fact, at least one of the women,
the one with a bit of this beautiful purpley-going-into-blue silk,
has her hand outstretched and pointing towards what would have been the Thames.
So we've got this story that's really
absolutely foundational and core to the development of Jewish theology
and to our whole kind of core historical narrative, who we are.
And it's been co-opted for an entirely different purpose.
It speaks in this painting probably
to the kings and queens of England and their royal heritage.
And of course, that's not really what the biblical story is about at all.
It's about a downtrodden, enslaved people who will be led out of slavery by this
young baby, Moses, who's been hand-chosen by God.
On the other hand, the narratives of the Hebrew Bible have
been read by other peoples in other contexts for millennia.
And even within the Jewish tradition,
we often reinterpret and interpret again our core narratives.
So in that sense, it's perfectly comprehensible as well.
And can, in that sort of sense, become
a focal point for dialogue, as well, between different faith communities.
The Foundling Hospital was established in 1739 by Royal Charter
and it was a charity that cared for, raised and educated babies
who would otherwise have been abandoned on the streets of London.
For families in poverty who could not care for their children,
there was no system for them to find
an alternative, other than to leave their
babies on doorsteps of churches or wealthy
houses or, in some cases, rubbish heaps.
Moses was critical for the Foundling Hospital.
The Foundling Museum has two large
works giving the Moses story.
There was a significant proportion of society who believed that
a foundling hospital was not the right thing to do.
That providing women, mothers, who were
in a desperate situation with somewhere to bring their babies,
that this was in fact rewarding sexual licence or promoting promiscuity.
Moses was the ultimate counterargument.
He was the original foundling.
He sits at the heart of the Christian message.
And he was the proof, the ultimate proof,
that in fact, a foundling hospital,
that taking in of a baby in peril,
had deep Christian roots and was
the right and moral thing to do.
I look at this from my perspective of working at the Foundling Museum
and working with young people who have grown up in care.
And I see this very complicated dynamic
with this child in the middle who will grow up,
I think, to experience what a lot
of children who have grown up in care do.
Where am I from?
Who is my family?
Where is home?
I mean, it's interesting how many
characters in fiction, they have lost their birth parents.
That sense of feeling not fully part of the whole,
being slightly on the margins, looking in.
But it gives them an agency and it gives them
a position on the outside to see what's going on with a kind of clarity
that very often people within the heart of the society cannot see.
I think when you look at Moses
and that persistence, that level of resilience,
that keeping going in the face of overwhelming odds,
you know, 40 years, to keep going.
I see in that resilience
and that strength, that trace of care experience there.
That he has grown up knowing that it's down to him.
My work always starts with a landscape,
a place where there was an incident or a violent event.
Trying to look at how violence can sometimes
disseminate into the environment.
Our actions and nature,
how these two are so tied together and how one just echoes the other.
Moses in Arabic is Musa. Nabi Musa.
And one of the explanations of the name of Musa is
'mu', which is water, and 'sa' is trees,
because he was found between the trees and the river.
And I find this quite beautiful as a metaphor.
Moses is saved, actually, from the water
for a new life, for a new possibility of life.
The soft water that carries and protects.
But also the water that kills the Egyptians
when they were walking behind them,
when the sea closes again.
That it can take all shapes and forms, being violent and being tender.
And I think it speaks a lot also of
human nature, not just being good or bad or one-faceted.
It, I think, speaks of the complexity of the human being.
What really strikes me the most about this painting
is this empty triangle that is beneath him.
This, like, black hole
that is under the cradle of Moses, where you feel he's ready for a fall.
It's very different from all
the colourful, lush drapery of the women that are surrounding Moses.
He's being saved, but what is his story or his life gonna become?
You could say that he's not saved, I mean he's destined to kill someone.
The composition of this picture draws Moses as if he's not there.
No one sees him, no one is looking at him,
although he's like, really in the centre of the picture.
I think he's a lonely character because
he inhabits this border space, this space of inbetween, of transition.
It's not about crossing a border, but he is living the border.
He is the passage from one place to the other
without ever reaching the beginning or the end.