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.