"In the project Beyond 100 degrees centigrade the two artists Maha Mustafa and Ibrahim Rashid have wanted to make an exhibition of the subject Humankind and the Environment. Their own experiences have in a fundamental way influenced their approach. Close at hand they have witnessed and experienced the antagonism between high technology and nature and its effects: the withering trees, the black clouds and the black rain.

However, the perspective of the exhibition is broad and goes beyond private views. The pictures and the objects should be seen in a global connection. Even limited environmental disasters can indirectly affect the whole planet. Likewise civilization will be suffering when nature is destroyed. Maha and Ibrahim claim that there is only one civilization as there is only one planet. That is a point of view that one should think of when some polemicists talk about "a clash of civilizations".

Nature is changing all the time and human actions, good or evil, can change the living conditions. When Maha and Ibrahim sent an inquiry about what had happened to their once so flourishing garden in Baghdad, they got a letter telling them that the trees had withered away and the fruits shrunken. Such things make lasting impressions and maybe art can be a way of handling the feelings just as it can help to investigate the past. Neither Maha nor Ibrahim remains attached to their personal memories but they go on to a point that can be called Beyond 100 degrees centigrade. In his essay Art and Environment or The Game of Burning Stones Ibrahim Rashid who is not only a creative artist but also an art critic relates Maha Mustafa's childhood memory of the flaming stones."

Clemens Altgård.
Excerpt from an article written in the book "Beyond 100° C"
Published in Sweden 2002