HIGH HEELS, HATING SADDAM ARE PART OF SULEYMANIA’S ARTY AURA
By Michael Luongo, mtluongo@aol.com

Bloomberg
September 19, 2007

Sept. 19 (Bloomberg) — Liquor-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 Suleymania, the once and maybe future
cultural capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Prince Ibrahim Pasha Baban built Suleymania 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 Suleymania 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.

The relative freedom of Suleymania 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 Suleymania 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 Talibani, wife of Iraqi President
Jalal Talibani, 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 Suleymania 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 Suleymania.