Kurdish-Iraqi artist Walid Siti on conflict and loss

Every society undergoes change, but many people keep a core idea of their nation and cultural heritage through a strong identification with particular landscapes and narratives.

For Kurdish-Iraqi artist Walid Siti, it is the mountains of Kurdistan that have a deep symbolism. But the mountains in his paintings have a fragility that is unexpected, and it is this sense of vulnerability that is pervasive.

His work, ‘Monument of a Forgotten Story’, part of his Re-Construction exhibition now showing at EOA.P gallery in London, shows a ghostly white mountain that appears to be enmeshed within a fretwork of spindly scaffolding. It is like a beautiful creature that is caught in a trap. Here is the story of a nation’s suffering through war and hardship over many years, and perhaps a sense that in the rush to erase the sadness and pull the country into modernity something of its soul has been lost.

The mountains that for many Kurdish people have been considered ‘our only friends’ through adversity are seen to an extent to be neglected hostages to fortune in uncertain times of rapid change.

Original article by Denize Murray

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Kurdish-Iraqi artist Walid Siti on conflict and loss