Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1978 Iran

Year of Migration to the UK: 2013

Other name/s: Sherko Abbas Abdul-Razaq

Biography

Artist Sherko Abbas was born in Iran in 1978 to a Kurdish-Iraqi family with a long history of political engagement. His father Abbas Abdulrazaq was a former Peshmerga fighter and a filmmaker during the 1980s, documenting clashes between Saddam Hussain's forces and Kurdish rebels. Abbas and his family returned to Sulaymaniyah, an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq when he was two years old, having lived in Iran as refugees. As a young man, Abbas participated in creative activism: in 1998, along with fellow Kurdish artists, Omer Essa, Bahadine Sheik Karim, and Rahel Jabar, he burned his work in the streets in an act of collective protest. Following a BA in Fine Art at the College of Fine Art in Sulaymaniyah (2005), Abbas immigrated to the UK in 2013, graduating with a Masters in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2015, though he sees his time in the UK as temporary. Abbas' practice encompasses video, performance, sculpture, text and sound, and is concerned with aural and visual memory as well as the geopolitical situation in contemporary Iraq. He is also interested in observing how war has been absorbed into Iraqi culture, through music, film, cartoons, children’s toys and public sculpture.

Abbas' work has included When the Wild Instruments Sing, a sound performance presented at Goldsmiths in 2014. The Wild Instrument, from which the performance derived, is an ongoing project, initiated by Abbas, involving a musical instrument made from a handmade object called a damaqachan (translated from Iraqi into English as 'spoke'), a simple toy constructed from bicycle spokes, nails and matches, which, when played, issues random explosive sounds. When the Wild Instruments Sing was created in collaboration with two contemporary musicians: the artist's sister, Khabat Abas, improviser and cellist, and Hardi Kurda, improviser and composer. The latter, instead of writing musical notation, drew a movement, based on the principle on which the instrument operates: to be played, it needs to be pulled and released. Other recent work has included Music of the Bush Era (2017) in which Abbas juxtaposes, on two parallel screens, archival footage shot by his sister (a cellist in the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra) and contemporary recordings, to tell the story of the unlikely trip she took with the orchestra to Washington DC in 2003, to perform in front of President Bush at the Kennedy Centre. Abbas is critical in this work of what he views as a futile propagandistic gesture, partly inspired by Slavoj Zizek’s analysis in the documentary film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), of the widespread ideological use of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. As in Music of the Bush Era, the work entitled What is July doing? (2010), also features a female performer, albeit in a markedly different setting. July, filmed in a seemingly empty fitness club, lifts weights attached to her hair, her exercises creating a strange formal dissonance in these usually predictable and obvious surroundings. Paper Puppet Testimony (2019) is an experimental documentary, which makes use of archival footage taken by Abbas' father, to recount narratives of Kurdish women freed from Sulaymaniyah's Red Prison during the 1991 Kurdish uprising. Interested in stories that are easily forgotten, Abbas seeks, through his work, to incorporate them into official memory.

Abbas' work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in the UK and abroad, including Estrangement, The Showroom, London (2010), Vernacularity, Alternativa International Visual Arts Festival, Gdansk, Poland (2011); Archaic, Iraq Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017), Bagdad mon amour, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2018), Theatre of Operations, MoMA PS1, New York (2019), and Towner International, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2020). Abbas also works as a curator, organiser and co-ordinator of cultural events. He curated, inter alia, the project Sermedy Le 437.072 sq km (2007) and was operations manager for the project Post-war Culture in Iraq (2010), both at the Amna Suraka Museum, Sulaymaniyah. In 2017, in collaboration with curator Aneta Szyłak, he researched and coordinated the project In-between Worlds: Kurdish Contemporary Artists, resulting in a collection of artworks by more than thirty Kurdish-Iraqi artists, now part of the Imago Mundi Collection, Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche, Treviso, Italy, and an accompanying publication. Sherko Abbas lives and works in London, England.

Related books

Tamara Chalabi and Paolo Colombo, eds., Archaic (Milan: Mousse Publishing, 2017)
Luciano Benetton, Claudio Scorretti, Irina Ungureanu, Aneta Szyłak, Erkan Özgen, Şener Özmen, In Between Worlds: Kurdish Contemporary Artists (Treviso: Antiga Edizioni, 2017)

Related organisations

Goldsmiths College, University of London (student)

Selected exhibitions

Towner International, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne (2020)
Everyday Objects of Carceral Spaces, The University of Huddersfield (2019)
Sherko Abbas, Theater of Operations The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, MoMA, New York (2019)
Bagdad mon amour, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris (2018)
Archaic, Iraq Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017)
Digite, The Showroom, London (2015)
When the Wild Instruments Sing, Goldsmiths College, University of London (2014)
Vernacularity, Alternativa International Visual Arts Festival, Gdansk, Poland (2011)
Estrangement, The Showroom, London (2010)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Sherko Abbas]

Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.

Sherko Abbas artist