Facing living past in the present

Rushdi Anwar is a Kurdish-Australian artist whose childhood was strongly impacted by war in Iraq and the genocide committed by Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein against Kurdish people. Anwar’s home town of Halabja in Kurdistan, northern Iraq was bombed by Hussein with chemical weapons on the 16th of March, 1988 in a genocidal attack that left over 5000 Kurdish people dead, including 14 members of the artist’s family.

'Facing living past in the present' is a video work of the artist’s hands tearing up an image of Saddam Hussein’s face then sticking it back together with black tape. This action is repeated again and again until Hussein’s face is entirely blacked out. It is accompanied by an evocative soundtrack of Arabian oud music by Iraqi-Assyrian musician, Munir Bashir.

The dizzying rhythm of destruction and repair in the work reflects the cycles of instability and violence experienced by the artist as a boy. Anwar said, 'I grew up in a place that was constantly a space of violence, of conflict. When I was a child it was Kurdish freedom fighters [at war] with the Iraqi government, then at the same time it was the Iraqi-Iranian war, then the Iraqi army against Kurdish freedom fighters, then the Halabja attack and Al-Anfal [genocide against Kurds in Iraq], and then the first Gulf War. Turmoil was just constant.'1

Anwar's work attempts to process the trauma, desire for justice, and hope for repair experienced by the victims of Saddam Hussein. At the same time, it expresses the inability to ever fully comprehend or reconcile with his actions.

Footnotes
1. ‘Rushdi Anwar’, Artist Profile, Issue 25, November 2013, p. 120