{"id":37248,"date":"2025-06-06T10:21:29","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T08:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=37248"},"modified":"2025-06-06T22:47:55","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T20:47:55","slug":"iraqs-kurdish-genocide-and-three-wars-artists-osman-ahmed-fakher-mohammed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/iraqs-kurdish-genocide-and-three-wars-artists-osman-ahmed-fakher-mohammed\/","title":{"rendered":"Iraq’s Kurdish Genocide and Three Wars: Artists Osman Ahmed & Fakher Mohammed"},"content":{"rendered":"
A joint Arab\/Kurdish exhibition at Baghdad\u2019s The Gallery showcased how the nation\u2019s \u201ctwo solitudes\u201d can unite through art. \u201c<\/span>In a time when maps are redrawn and memory is rewritten, the true homeland is what lives in the soul and identity remains an unbroken thread \u2014 regardless of time or shifting borders.\u201d \u2014The Gallery, Baghdad.<\/span><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hadani Ditmars<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

A recent exhibition at Baghdad\u2019s <\/span>The Gallery<\/span><\/a>, billed as the first joint Arab\/Kurdish exhibition in the capital in two decades, was a study in how the nation\u2019s \u201ctwo solitudes\u201d can come together through art. Featuring ten artists and 30 works, the stars of <\/span>Infrangible<\/span><\/i> were Sulaymaniyah-based Osman Ahmed, an artist who has dedicated his life to documenting his people\u2019s genocide, and Fakher Mohammed, an Iraqi artist and prominent member of the Baghdad Modern Art Group<\/a>, who studied under the mid-century school\u2019s co-founder, Shakir Hassan al Said.<\/span> (Jewad Selim, who designed the Tahrir Square Monument to Freedom<\/a> just before he died, initiated the group with his former student al Said.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Opening on the eve of the Arab League Summit, in a city all spiffed up with fancy new five-star hotels but a still non-functioning electrical grid some 22 years since the invasion, it was a suitable aesthetic response to the \u201cLet\u2019s Make Iraq Great Again\u201d mania gripping Baghdad.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, thanks to an improved security situation credited by many to the efforts of Prime Minister Sudani, as well as anti-money laundering laws introduced by the Americans in 2023 that channeled dirty money hitherto destined for Iran and Lebanon into the local economy (including a number of new art galleries), <\/span>Baghdad appears on the surface to be doing well. Dozens of new construction projects lend a veneer of prosperity to Iraq\u2019s capital, in spite of apparent economic decline as oil prices continue to drop.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>And the Arab League summit motif \u2014 a circular riff on Caliph Mansour\u2019s round City of Baghdad \u2014 evokes the kind of Neo-Abbasid aspirations that informed Saddam Hussein’s ambitious Rifat Chadirji-led <\/span>architectural additions<\/span><\/a> to the city, in preparation for a Nonaligned Nations meeting in 1981 that never happened due to the war with Iran.<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Timed well for the upcoming national elections in November, the summit spurred the construction of three new hotels including a Movenpick, and one that remains under wraps. A third one called The Heart of the World \u2014 perhaps a reference back to the Abbasid glory days when Baghdad was just that \u2014 housed the \u201cpress center\u201d\u00a0 (where there were only two non-Arab journalists, hardly any English translation and a single Chinese blogger who sent his greetings to Sudani from President Xi Jinping in classical Arabic). Here an entranceway flanked by a wannabe pop art version of Cesaire Baldaccini\u2019s giant thumb sculpture La Pouce mixed uneasily with a neo-classical marble lobby decorated with a pastiche of rococo fantasia \u2014 Watteau paintings, reimagined in day glo needlepoint.<\/span><\/p>\n

But before all of this neo-colonial\/state capitalist kitsch, there was a serious contemporary art scene in Baghdad, and T<\/span>he Gallery\u2019s latest exhibition bodes well for its return. Sadly, it\u2019s not only Iraq\u2019s ancient sites that have been looted but also its modern heritage. The Saddam Arts Centre, now reimagined as the National Museum of Modern Art, had over 85% of its 20<\/span>th<\/span> century art works stolen, after the invasion, with an unknown number of pieces reappearing at prominent Western auction houses.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\"\"\/<\/a><\/div><\/div>
\"Detail<\/a>

Detail of a drawing by Osman Ahmed.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Osman<\/a>

Osman Ahmed's large drawing documenting the Kurdish genocide and exodus.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Nugra<\/a>

Nugra Salman Camp by Osman Ahmed (courtesy of the artist).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Another<\/a>

Another perspective on Nugra Salman Camp by Osman Ahmed (courtesy of the artist).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Fakher<\/a>

Fakher Mohammad, a painting in his series The Recovered Memory of the Symbols of the Earth, 2022 (all photos courtesy Hadani Ditmars).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"Detail<\/a>

Detail of Fakher Mohammed's painting.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"<\/a>

Three other artists in \"Infrangible\" include Salam Omar, with his recreation of blast walls that used to separate Shia and Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, in the wake of the 2003 invasion, which he has reimagined as sculptures decorated with graffiti.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"<\/a>

Maki Omran\u2019s surreal collages of what he names Overlapping Worlds that blend images of extra-terrestrials, ancient sites, American war planes, Donald Trump with a tattered Iraq flag on his arm and grieving Sumeriam goddesses, that reads like an iphone scroll through history and yet somehow manages to capture Iraqi reality.<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"\"TV<\/a>

\"TV Memory\" by Mohammed Al-Kanani, mixed media on wood, 200x200cm, 2025 (courtesy of the artist).<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

\"\"<\/span>\"\"<\/span>\"\"<\/span>\"\"<\/span>\"\"<\/span>\"Fakher<\/span>\"\"<\/span>\"\"<\/span>\"\"<\/span>\"\"<\/span><\/div><\/div>\n
\n

In many ways, this ambitious exhibition at The Gallery was an exercise in nation building and a reminder of what really makes Iraq great \u2014 its depth of culture and history. Amidst all the wheeling-dealing frenzy of corruption, the apocalyptic climate change\/fracking induced air quality, and heightened sectarianism<\/a>, it was a small sanctuary of <\/span>rohe iraqeeyeh<\/span><\/i> \u2014 Iraqi soul.<\/span><\/p>\n

While current genocides \u2014 like the one unfolding in Gaza in livestreamed horror \u2014 have been televisualized ad nauseum, the Kurdish genocide was hidden under a veil of secrecy and state repression. Artist Osman Ahmed\u2019s life\u2019s work has been to reclaim agency for its victims by revealing the reality of the genocide through his art.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ahmed <\/span>graduated from the Institute of Art in Sulaymaniyah in 1985 and went on to teach art to children in rural Kurdish villages. A survivor of the Anfal campaigns that began in 1988 as a Baathist counter-insurgency campaign at the end of the Iran\/Iraq war, he fled to the UK in 1990, escaping first across the Iranian border. While he was in Tehran, he held an exhibition of works inspired by the children of Halabja at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and worked for the <\/span>Patriotic Union of Kurdistan\u2019s<\/span><\/a> media department. When he went to Syria for six months for an embassy of Kuwait sponsored exhibition about victims of Saddam Hussein, he met Jalal Talabani<\/a>, who helped him get to Moscow. Ahmed finally obtained asylum in the UK in 1991, taking odd jobs to support himself, and working on his art as he was able.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ahmed earned his MA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts in London, and his PhD from Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts, London. His PhD project documented the Kurdish genocide through drawing and recording the testimonies of 15 Anfal survivors as well as investigating the Kurds\u2019 collective memory of the genocide.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a way, his doctoral project never ended. It has become his life\u2019s work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Through delicately detailed pen and ink drawings of scenes from the genocide, he evokes both the pathos and ongoing resistance and solidarity of the Kurdish people. But with a de facto Kurdish state within Iraq now plagued by both its own corrupt leaders and <\/span>disappearances of opponents<\/span><\/a>, as well as ongoing <\/span>Arabization campaigns<\/span><\/a> in and around Kirkuk, his work takes on a new poignancy and urgency. He seems a man possessed by the crucible of the Kurdish dream; he just can\u2019t stop drawing scenes from his memory of mass displacement, imprisonment and exile, where crowds of individual victims seem to merge into a single human face.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

His four works in the show span from 2019 until 2025 \u2014 all shown for the first time in Baghdad. His latest work is an untitled 600x100cm acrylic on canvas vertical drawing, depicting a long line of humanity that slowly unwinds downward across the canvas to reveal individual human faces. Another acrylic on canvas work from 2019 is a 30x130cm horizontal version of a similar play of line and perspective, with a formline suggestion of the mountain homeland of the captive Kurds. A pen and ink drawing from 2019, compresses a mass of Kurdish prisoners into a kind of human sound wave crying for justice, and a new work experiments with an innovative style depicting the Nogra Salman Prison Camp<\/a> in a laser cut on wood drawing.<\/p>\n

While Ahmed\u2019s work is inexorably tied to his experience as a survivor of Anfal, its pure humanity transcends the personal to reach a kind of universal meaning. The eyes of his figures, asking \u201cwhy are you allowing this to happen?\u201d dare the viewer to return their gaze.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cArmenians see themselves in my work,\u201d he tells The Markaz Review. \u201cJews too, find themselves in the story. Palestinians find themselves inside my work. I\u2019m talking about everywhere around the world and calling for an end to war. My style is simple. The line is representing humanity everywhere.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the Anfal campaign is not part of Iraq\u2019s educational curriculum, and \u201cis barely touched on even in Kurdistan,\u201d he says, many young Iraqi artists who came to see the exhibition told him it was their first exposure to the reality of the genocide.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Although Ahmed learned about the Baghdad Modern School as a young art student, he had never travelled to Baghdad and was exposed to <\/span>Fakher Mohammad\u2019s <\/span>work for the first time at the exhibition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mohammad, born eight years before Ahmed, in Babylon, where he was Dean of the College of Fine Arts from 2017-2022, is in many ways a peer, albeit one whose trajectory and life experience ran in a parallel but separate world. Widely recognized as a pioneering figure in the Iraqi contemporary art scene, he has two degrees in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, including a Master’s completed in 1980. In 2003, he earned his PhD in Modern Painting. This exhibition was the pair\u2019s first in-person encounter with each other and their work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Although Fakher Mohammad\u2019s art, ranging from the abstract to the more representational, is stylistically far from Ahmed\u2019s pen and ink drawings, Mohammad too is a product as he told the The Markaz Review of \u201cthree wars\u201d \u2014 the Iran\/Iraq war, the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion and ensuing sectarian strife. Like Ahmed\u2019s work, his oeuvre is a form of healing and regrounding of the 20<\/span>th<\/span> and early 21<\/span>st<\/span> century Iraqi experience. It\u2019s also a testament to the genocides in Iraq \u2014 both cultural and human.<\/span><\/p>\n

When the Saddam Arts Centre was looted in 2003, he points out, \u201cThe US soldiers just stood by watching.\u201d While his generation had access to art museums where they could contemplate actual work by contemporary masters, now there is a whole new generation of art students who have no access to their modernist heritage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Inspired by the ethos of the Baghdad Modern Group, that <\/span>united\u00a0artists under the shared commitment of \u201cIstilham al turath,\u201d or \u201cseeking inspiration\u00a0and motivation from artistic heritage through innovative methods,\u201d <\/span>Mohammad excels at transforming heritage into contemporary idioms.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the <\/span>Infrangible<\/span><\/i> show, he presents a tryptic of canvases fusing ancient symbols and contemporary reality. <\/span>2022\u2019s \u201cThe Recovered Memory of the Symbols of the Earth,\u201d blends Babylonian motifs with natural elements, employing them as talismans of protection in a war-torn world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI want to show that the elements \u2014 the sun, the moon and the animal world \u2014 are more powerful than humans,\u201d Mohammad says. \u201cThey will survive after everything, and we are beholden to their power.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In his works, doves peek out from bloodied palm trees, goddesses grow out of the Babylonian mud, and an omnipresent Mesopotamia speaks in contemporary tongues.<\/span><\/p>\n

He is happy to be showing his work alongside Ahmed but notes that \u201cthis is not the first time in two decades there has been an Arab\/Kurdish art exhibition in Baghdad.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He recalls a group show in 2006 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where <\/span>Ismail Khayat, the iconic Kurdish artist who encoded Kurdish folklore and symbolism with the ideas of collective struggle and political isolation, and Erbil-based <\/span>Mohammed Arif<\/span><\/a>, exhibited alongside Arab artists.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And that was not the only one, he says. \u201cThere were always Kurdish artists exhibiting in Baghdad, even when the political situation between Kurds and Arabs wasn\u2019t good, the art transcended all of that and brought us together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mohammad himself had a solo show in Sulaymaniyah in 2019, launched by the widow of Talabani, <\/span>Hero Ibrahim Ahmed (the former first lady of Iraq from 2005 to 2014), an<\/span> avid collector and patron of the arts. The venue was the <\/span>Amna Suraka Museum<\/span><\/a>, once known as the infamous \u201cRed Prison,\u201d a notorious torture center under Saddam\u2019s regime.<\/span><\/p>\n

The exhibition was a great success, Mohammad tells me, smiling widely at the intersection of his scorched Mesopotamian earth works and Ahmed\u2019s powerful witnessing of the Kurdish genocide. \u201cShe bought four of my paintings.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There are works by other artists of note here tonight, including Mohammed al Kanani<\/a>, whose 2025 work TV Memories is a Warholian trip down memory lane, evoking the stars of pre-invasion Iraqi television with mixed media tableaux on wood; Makki Omran\u2019s<\/a> surreal collages of what he names Overlapping Worlds<\/em> that blend images of extra-terrestrials, ancient sites, American war planes, Donald Trump with a tattered Iraq flag on his arm and grieving Sumerian goddesses, that reads like an iphone scroll through history and yet somehow manages to capture Iraqi reality; Salam Omar\u2019s<\/a> recreation of blast walls that used to separate Shiah and Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad, in the wake of the 2003 invasion, which he has re-empowered as sculptures decorated with graffiti; Sulaymaniyah based Daro Resole\u2019s<\/a> abstract expressionist scarred landscapes of Kurdistan and Kurdish artist Salih Alnajar\u2019s haunting abstract fragmented figures seeking wholeness; and the mystical calligraphy rich works of Karim Farhan \u2014who emigrated to Switzerland years ago \u2014 reminiscent of Shakir Hassan Al Said\u2019s late stage Sufi-influenced art.<\/p>\n

The Gallery is in Karrada, a neighborhood that once symbolized Iraqi diversity, where the site of a <\/span>2016 bombing by ISIL<\/span><\/a> was <\/span>transformed into a pop-up shrine<\/span><\/a> by Riyadh Ghenea, (the artist who initiated the exhibition). Here for a fleeting moment, the old Iraq and its federalist ideal come alive, transcending the current chaos and uncertainty to reveal the soul of a long-suffering nation.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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