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.
THE VIDEO WORKS OF SHERKO ABBAS: Legacies of Personal Archives Made Collective is curated by Lila Nazemian and is co-presented by ArteEast and Maysles Documentary Center. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. Selections from the program will be screened in-person at Maysles Documentary Center on Friday, June 21 followed by a discussion between a guest and the curator. For information about the screening on June 21, visit maysles.org. The full program will be screened online on artearchive.org from June 20 – 30.
Film Program:
Total Run time: 104 min
Encounters on the Tigris, Part 1, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 12 min.
Encounters on the Tigris, Part 2, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 19 min.
Encounters on the Tigris, Part 3, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 10 min.
Cineholic, Sherko Abbas and Shirwan Fatihm, Iraq, 2021, 25 min.
The Music of the Bush Era, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 23 min.
The Tank of my Sketchbook, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 7 min.
Paper Puppet Testimony, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2019, 8 min.
Silence Along the River, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 7 min.
Sharwal, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 4 min.
Artist Biography:
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 interested in the current geopolitical situation in Iraq.
His works have been exhibited internationally including at: the Iraq pavilion at the 57th Venice biennale; MoMA PS1, New York; the Kunsthalle Münster, Germany; Middle East Institute, Washington D.C.; and the Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris, among others. His moving image works have been screened at the 38th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in Kassel, Aashra, Ashkal Alwan Online Film, Rencontres Internationales Paris/ Berlin at the Louvre Auditorium in Paris, the Open City Documentary Combined Programme: What Rules The Invisible in London, Visit Festival Het Bos Ankerrui 5-7 in Antwerp, Belgium, Ruya Shop in Baghdad, and Shasha Movies online streaming.
Encounters on the Tigris, Part 1, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 12 min.
Arabic and Kurdish with English subtitles
Encounters on the Tigris follows a journey taken by artist and filmmaker Sherko Abbas in 2022, along the ancient Tigris river, in search of previously undocumented oral traditions and the ecological knowledge they hold. His journey begins in the Kurdish Zakho district of northern Iraq and ends in Al Faw, where the river meets the Persian Gulf in the south.
Featuring interviews with folklorists, Quranic scholars, musicians and local communities, Abbas captures songs and stories about water that have been transmitted orally from one generation to the next for centuries. At a time when climate change is beginning to have devastating impacts across the region, the film highlights the precarity of communities who depend on the river and the environmental instability resulting from Iraq’s recent history, revealing ancient cultural traditions increasingly at odds with new ecological realities.
- Year2022
- Runtime12 minutes
- CountryIraq
- DirectorSherko Abbas
- FilmmakerSherko Abbas
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.
THE VIDEO WORKS OF SHERKO ABBAS: Legacies of Personal Archives Made Collective is curated by Lila Nazemian and is co-presented by ArteEast and Maysles Documentary Center. This program is part of the legacy program Unpacking the ArteArchive, which preserves and presents 20 years of film and video programming by ArteEast. Selections from the program will be screened in-person at Maysles Documentary Center on Friday, June 21 followed by a discussion between a guest and the curator. For information about the screening on June 21, visit maysles.org. The full program will be screened online on artearchive.org from June 20 – 30.
Film Program:
Total Run time: 104 min
Encounters on the Tigris, Part 1, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 12 min.
Encounters on the Tigris, Part 2, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 19 min.
Encounters on the Tigris, Part 3, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 10 min.
Cineholic, Sherko Abbas and Shirwan Fatihm, Iraq, 2021, 25 min.
The Music of the Bush Era, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 23 min.
The Tank of my Sketchbook, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 7 min.
Paper Puppet Testimony, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2019, 8 min.
Silence Along the River, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 7 min.
Sharwal, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2021, 4 min.
Artist Biography:
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 interested in the current geopolitical situation in Iraq.
His works have been exhibited internationally including at: the Iraq pavilion at the 57th Venice biennale; MoMA PS1, New York; the Kunsthalle Münster, Germany; Middle East Institute, Washington D.C.; and the Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris, among others. His moving image works have been screened at the 38th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in Kassel, Aashra, Ashkal Alwan Online Film, Rencontres Internationales Paris/ Berlin at the Louvre Auditorium in Paris, the Open City Documentary Combined Programme: What Rules The Invisible in London, Visit Festival Het Bos Ankerrui 5-7 in Antwerp, Belgium, Ruya Shop in Baghdad, and Shasha Movies online streaming.
Encounters on the Tigris, Part 1, Sherko Abbas, Iraq, 2022, 12 min.
Arabic and Kurdish with English subtitles
Encounters on the Tigris follows a journey taken by artist and filmmaker Sherko Abbas in 2022, along the ancient Tigris river, in search of previously undocumented oral traditions and the ecological knowledge they hold. His journey begins in the Kurdish Zakho district of northern Iraq and ends in Al Faw, where the river meets the Persian Gulf in the south.
Featuring interviews with folklorists, Quranic scholars, musicians and local communities, Abbas captures songs and stories about water that have been transmitted orally from one generation to the next for centuries. At a time when climate change is beginning to have devastating impacts across the region, the film highlights the precarity of communities who depend on the river and the environmental instability resulting from Iraq’s recent history, revealing ancient cultural traditions increasingly at odds with new ecological realities.
- Year2022
- Runtime12 minutes
- CountryIraq
- DirectorSherko Abbas
- FilmmakerSherko Abbas