Sherko Abbas is a Kurdish-Iraqi
artist. He was born in Iran in 1978 where his family lived as refugees and
returned to Iraq when he was two years old. He studied Fine Art in
Sulaymaniyah-Iraq and graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths
College, University of London in 2015.
He employs the
media of video, performance, sculpture and sound, his practice dedicated
to the sonic and visual memory and geopolitical situation of contemporary
Iraq. He more focused on the events of the Kurdish
uprising in the north in 1991and the invention of Iraq in 2003 as a key
to understanding how
war has been absorbed into local culture in Iraq, mostly
through music, film, cartoon, children’s toys and public sculpture.
His work The Music of Bush
Era was exhibited in ‘Archaic’, the Iraq Pavilion at the 57th Venice
Biennale (2017). He has participated in many other exhibitions, including
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin at the Louvre Auditorium/ Paris, Bagdad
mon amour at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam/ Paris ‘Vernacularity’ at the Alternativa International
Visual Arts Festival in Gdansk, Poland, and ‘Estrangement’ at the Showroom,
London.