IN CINEMA
THE VIDEO WORKS OF SHERKO ABBAS
Legacies of Personal Archives Made Collective
Tickets: $15 General Admission / $7 Reduced Price
Friday, June 21st at 7PM
Co-presented with ArteEast
For Sherko Abbas, archives represent more than the impetus behind his works, they reflect a deeply personal history. He is the son of Abbas Abdulrazaq, a Kurdish Peshmerga fighter and cameraman who documented his fighting squads and co-founded the first Kurdish state news broadcast following the Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein in 1991. Abbas grew up surrounded by his father’s archives, raised on the importance of collection as a form of preservation and knowing. Among the threads within his work is an interest in the cultural, historic and political significance of musical traditions within Iraq. While he has maintained a visual arts practice for decades, in recent years he has produced a significant number of video works that either emerge from his family’s archives or as a result of his own documentations of contemporary Kurdistan and Iraq.
THE VIDEO WORKS OF SHERKO ABBAS: Legacies of Personal Archives Made Collective presents nine videos made between 2019 - 2022. His films address a range of issues pertaining to social and political history, often focusing on specific memories or events to question larger narratives put forth by those in power. Abbas’ style is often raw, preferring a less polished edit of footage that asks viewers to deeply contemplate the images, sounds and people they are witnessing. SILENCE ALONG THE RIVER makes use of rare footage from his father’s Peshmerga archives depicting soldiers rowing a boat and collectively singing a song–footage meant to have recorded a battle that did not occur and thus, was not worthy of being used in 1988. PAPER PUPPET TESTIMONY and THE TANK OF MY SKETCHBOOK revolve around Abbas’ childhood memories, unpacking the erasure of a cabin used to torture Kurdish women in a Saddam-era prison turned museum, and the effects of state propaganda on children during the Iran-Iraq war, respectively. In his most recent three-part film, ENCOUNTERS ON THE TIGRIS, Abbas embarks on a journey along the river documenting the effects of ecological collapse and recording the oral and folk music traditions of communities that have lived there for centuries. This revelatory journey and the volume of documentation collected that did not make these films’ final cuts can perhaps be viewed as the beginning of the artist’s own ever expanding archival legacy. Whether accessing his family archives, public records, or his own recorded materials, Abbas’ work complicates official historical narratives and presents poetic multifaceted perspectives of Kurdish Iraqi society.
This program is curated by Lila Nazemian, Programs and Communications Director at ArteEast, and is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast.
Film Program:
• ENCOUNTERS ON THE TIGRIS, PART 2, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 19 min.
• ENCOUNTERS ON THE TIGRIS, PART 3, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 10 min.
• THE TANK OF MY SKETCHBOOK, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 7 min.
• PAPER PUPPET TESTIMONY, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 8 min.
• SILENCE ALONG THE RIVER, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 7 min.
• SHARWAL, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 4 min.
TRT: 55 min.
Post-screening discussion with Lila Nazemian and Xeyal Qertel!
The films will also be available online from June 20 – 30 for free ($5 suggested donation). Please visit artearchive.org for more information.
Kurdish-Iraqi artist Sherko Abbas was born in Iran in 1978, where his family lived as refugees. They returned to Iraq when he was two years old. Abbas studied Fine Art in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq and went on to earn an MFA from Goldsmiths College, London in 2015. His work explores sonic and visual memory, with a focus on modern memory that relies on archival materials. Abbas is interested in the current geopolitical situation in Iraq.
ArteEast’s vision is of a thriving and sustainable arts sector in the Middle East and North Africa. Our mission is to deepen international arts engagement and to provide support to MENA-based artists and arts organizations in order to broaden the global audience for contemporary culture from the region.
