Melting Ice 

Performance with video installation

Nomadism: Who can afford it? (performance and exhibition series)

Up Gallery, Berlin, December 2014.

This performance ‘’consisted of a small cube of ice and a photo of me as a child at the beginning of the Iranian revolution when the Kurdish people were, for a short time, free. Words such as “freedom,” “love,” and “revolution” were uttered in the performance to confront, to resist and to fight the coldness of the ice, the hardness of the ice. By repeating these words so close to the ice that my lips could feel its coldness, they were able to melt it.

For me as a Kurdish artist and as a person living in exile, these particular words have always been a part of my political and human identity. They have had great meaning and value in my life and my artistic practice, especially when I was a child. After the uprising of the Iranian peoples in 1979, I tasted freedom in Kurdistan. It, unfortunately, did not last long and ended a few years later with Khomeini’s attack on Kurdistan and his occupation of all of Iran, which ended in war and oppression, which continues to this day. 

The use of these words in performance expresses my own involvement with this oppression and my reflection on its effects on life and art in Kurdistan, as well as my reflections on the Kurdish struggles and resistance that I have witnessed in the course of my life. The performance was a work on the self and self-discovery in a world full of violence and oppression. It was a way of connecting with historical and ongoing struggles in Kurdistan and elsewhere in the world. It expressed the hope that the great political and social oppression can be dissolved.