|
High Heels, Hating Saddam Are Part of
Sulaimaniyah's Arty Aura
19.9.2007
By Michael Luongo
|
|
|
|
September 19, 2007
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', --
iquor-shop windows gleam at night with the amber
glow of whiskey bottles. Women sport high heels,
tight pants and hair unveiled. There's a freer
spirit in Sulaimaniyah, the once and maybe future
cultural capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Prince Ibrahim Pasha Baban built Sulaimaniyah in
1784 as ``a place where Kurdish culture could
flourish,'' Kurdish Cultural Minister Falakaddin
Kakeyi told me. Now, Kakeyi says, this city of
800,000 in northern Iraq's autonomous region of
Kurdistan serves as a cultural beacon for the
estimated 26 million Kurds scattered throughout
Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Armenia and other places, the
world's largest ethnic group without a country.
I entered Sulaimaniyah along the wide boulevard
called Salim Street, which is lined with hotels and
multistory construction projects. These give way to
low-rise buildings on narrow, busy market streets
punctuated by monumental traffic circles with grand
government buildings.
The liberal spirit to which unwrapped women and
unconcealed booze attest has its roots in Prince
Ibrahim Pasha Baban's founding the city as a liberal
alternative to Erbil, which had been strangled by
repressive tribal authorities over its
millennium-long history. |
Ismail Khayat, nicknamed the "Grandfather of Kurdish
Art," looks through personal works which were
inspired by the Anfal, Saddam's plan to wipe out the
Kurdish people, in Sulaimaniyah, Iraq, located in
the country's northern Kurdish region, on July 19,
2007. Photo Bloomberg. |
The relative freedom of Sulaimaniyah has nurtured
the cultural scene, Kurds told me, fostering local
artists and even luring back some of the expatriates
who have fled over the years.
``Art installations are all the rage,'' said Sami
Muemin, who heads a German-Kurdish association of
artists called Art-Art Laboratory and anchors
``Cultural Weekly News,'' a half-hour television
program featuring interviews with local artists.
`Space and Time'
Muemin took me to Sardam Gallery, a new art space
where we found 16 3-foot-square Lucite sheets in a
row hanging from the ceiling at eye level. Each was
covered with an oversized portrait, and when viewed
head-on the individual faces melded.
It was the work of Afan Sediq, a 32-year-old artist
with curly bobbed hair who had years before moved to
Germany.
She called the piece ``Space and Time'' and
described it as an examination of family and
disconnection. ``Such a person like me,'' she said,
``has been separated from inside and outside,
Kurdistan and Germany. I think I don't belong here,
I don't belong there.''
While Muemin taped an interview with Sadiq for his
TV show, I went over to a landscape painter named
Ali Hussein, 57, who was checking out the space for
his coming exhibit. He also had emigrated, settling
for a time in Greece, but now had returned to live
in Kurdistan. When I mentioned I was from New York,
he said an exhibit there is ``every artist's
dream.'' Later he showed me gallery postcards of his
work, which had a watercolor softness.
Bloody History
The next day I visited Rostam Aghala, an artist and
photographer and the director of Zamwa, the city's
leading art gallery.
The building, tucked away in the Sulaimaniyah souk,
is itself a work of art, an old stone structure from
the end of World War I.
Its threshold has an ornate beaten-copper jam,
beyond which I found seven art-crammed rooms. The
windows' multicolored panes let in a mottled, moody
light. We chatted under a picture of Ibrahim Ahmed,
the building's original owner and the father of Hero
Talabani, wife of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani,
who founded the institution in 1996. Paintings,
photography and mixed-media montages were on the
walls, while sculptures, plates and other plastic
arts found floor or shelf space.
Kurdistan's bloody history provided the inspiration
for some pieces. The long oppression of Iraqi Kurds
came to a head in the late 1980s when Saddam Hussein
tried to wipe out Kurdistan during an ethnic purge.
Other pieces celebrated village life or the beauty
of Kurdish women.
No Opera House
Colors fell into two themes -- bright and
kaleidoscopic and somewhat Cubist, or somber with
earth tones, like a soldier's camouflage. Ceramics
scattered on stands and shelves ranged from abstract
figurines to plates with Assyrian symbols from
Mesopotamian history.
The sales manager, Dlshad Bahadin, said most of the
works, representing about 130 artists, sold for
about $300. Last year the gallery took in about
$47,000, mostly from expatriate Kurds visiting from
Europe.
Aghala wasn't sure American occupation was good for
Iraq's artists. ``When the French invaded Egypt they
built an opera house,'' he said. ``The U.S. Army
could not introduce U.S. art and culture to Iraq's
people.''
I, however, could bring Iraqi art back to the U.S. I
bought a colorful painting of fish by Hesen Fetah
for a mere $200. Bahadin helped me, showing me his
own paintings, including an acrylic called
``Paradise Tree,'' painted in a naive manner that
reminded me of Australian Aboriginal art.
Mesopotamian Relics
You won't find any contemporary art at the
Sulaimaniyah Museum, which concentrates on
archeology and has become one of Iraq's most
important museums for Mesopotamian relics since the
pillaging of Baghdad's Iraqi National Museum. The
sense of a living museum is at the Academy of Fine
Arts, where 500 young people study painting,
drawing, sculpture, ceramics and
music.
School was out when I visited, but the teachers were
in, working in the quiet, dust-filled summertime
classrooms. One teacher, the artist Saman Karem, 47,
was painting an oversized canvas of mottled khaki-colored
patches, reminding me of army uniforms. Karem told
me any relation to war was unintended. He said
Kurdistan's ``stability and security give us more
chance to show our art. Art needs stability.''
The Grandfather
The last artist I met was the shy, frail Ismail
Khayat, 63, whom fellow artists have dubbed the
Grandfather of Kurdish Art and who is one of the few
Kurdish artists with work in the National Museum's
permanent collection. Sagging jowls frame his bushy
moustache, giving him the look of a basset hound. Of
his nickname he said, ``I am thankful to all who
call me this, but in terms of art and history and
culture, I feel I am just starting.''
He said Saddam tried ``not to shed light on Kurdish
art on purpose,'' due to ethnic discrimination and
because artists tried ``to oppose the regime in any
way.'' He said Baghdad artists were now seeking
refuge in Kurdistan but did not face the
discrimination Kurds once felt in the capital.
Khayat recently moved to studio space in a new
U.S.-style suburban development on the city's edge,
and his art was still packed in boxes. Rummaging
through them, he found a mix of small canvases of
birds and grotesque papier-mache masks that reminded
me of South American carnival devils.
He laid them out like cards, in patterns by faces
and hues. The images were gruesome but colorful.
Khayat explained that they represented the Anfal,
Saddam's genocidal plan against the Kurds. Still, he
did them in ``colors that follow Kurds around, from
folklore and women's clothes.''
S&M Club
I later discovered that the masks he placed so
casually on the floor sold for $800 apiece in New
York's Pomegranate Gallery. With something like 50
objects at our fingertips, we were likely playing
with the equivalent of the Zamwa gallery's annual
sales.
I had hoped to hang out in bohemian clubs but
couldn't find any. So I spent my last night in the
city's oddly named S&M club, a red and black bar in
the newly opened Bowling Center. This is a
three-story glass-and-neon extravaganza with bars,
restaurants and a bowling alley. It's a Kurdish
interpretation of U.S. life and the city's hottest
nightspot.
I went with Simko Ahmed, a Kurdish artist, and
displaced friends from Baghdad. Bowling Center might
have excited me in high school, but after five
minutes I lost interest.
What piqued my curiosity were the young women in
traditional outfits, colorful displays of sequined
and gold-threaded dresses, their necks adorned with
heavy jewelry -- things Khayat had said inspired his
art.
The garish neon displays were no match for their
handmade finery, proving neither war nor crude
Americanization could diminish the culture and color
of Sulaimaniyah.
bloomberg com
Top |
Kurd Net
does not take credit for and is not responsible for the content of news
information on this page
|
® 