Guest Editor's Introduction: Toward a Greater Understanding of Contemporary Kurdish Art and Aesthetics
Despite their increasing visibility in the international media and spheres of politics in the Middle East, the Kurds in Iraq remain a blind spot in terms of socio-cultural and historical accounts of them, their cultures and histories.2 Although the politics of potential statehood for the Kurds and K...
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| Published in: | Journal of Intersectionality 2018-01, Vol.2 (2), p.3-10 |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Despite their increasing visibility in the international media and spheres of politics in the Middle East, the Kurds in Iraq remain a blind spot in terms of socio-cultural and historical accounts of them, their cultures and histories.2 Although the politics of potential statehood for the Kurds and Kurdish identity are complicated and problematized by a number of historical issues, this special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of intersectional analyses of the representation of this identity and its various attributes in terms of art and aesthetics. Conversations with local friends, visits during art shows, fellowship over meals and, of course, numerous discussions fueled by copious amounts of strong Kurdish tea, yielded an image of a diverse group of visual artists, musicians, singers, writers, poets and actors who were not simply making art for arts sake, but who were involved in their own forms of activism, engaging in social commentary and working at the intersection of art, culture, nation, gender, class, privilege and conflict. The challenge to writing about Kurdish social histories, therefore, is to search for the hidden, while finding new ways of reading and understanding the nuances of the current cultural world of the Kurds.8 Throughout the work presented in this journal, the authors repeatedly point to the large gap in information about the Kurds and the cultural products of Kurdish culture. Placing the practices of these Kurdish artists and cultural producers working in Iraqi Kurdistan under our focus, Making Faces: Art and Intersectionality in Iraqi Kurdistan, investigates the ways in which artists and activists, journalists and politicians, teachers and students, displaced peoples and citizens, are coming together to make art and produce visual events in a way that reflects and confronts the hard questions of a society in a period of rapid social, economic and political transformation. |
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| ISSN: | 2515-2114 2515-2122 |