Of Art, Money, and Kurdish Folklore – Tahir Kurd, the Artist Revisited

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Money can’t buy me

In the flow of our long enduring dialogue, the Iraqi Kurdish artist, Tahir Fatah, smiled a cheeky smile and said, “Some of our Kurdish painters seem to think that if you add a little Kurdish village to the picture or a young lady with spangles and bangles that’s Kurdish art – or doing portraits of the Kurdish tribal and political leaders – sometimes they are the same thing.

Our leaders are usually still mainly tribal and for them, too, our art is just spangles, bangles and anything that flatters their vanity. In my lifetime Kurdish culture has almost entirely disappeared just to be brought out of the wardrobe at Newroz (Kurdish New Year) or for picnics. I stay in exile because my culture has gone, and vanished. It has been replaced by a false culture of money and flashy displays of wealth. These nouveau riche Kurds don’t buy art: they pay for Botox and veneers on their teeth, and then they buy the biggest, ugliest cars on the market so long as they are expensive and show how much they cost.”

At this, I come in and say how a friend just told me that the Turkish dictator, Erdogan, and the American filibuster, Trump, both drive 1.5 million-dollar cars and the Syrian conqueror, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a tank…

“You see!” Tahir chuckles. We then carry on our dialogue.

Covid Curfew

“During the Covid lockdown, life in exile here got much worse and contact with the outside world almost collapsed. I felt bemused and bored and so I painted this self-portrait here”, he points out the meanings behind the details: “I am the ape looking out from my cage in the zoo wondering what was going on. I began thinking about the Hudson River school of painters and their experiences, so I added in, as if part of the dream, a lone man in the mists in his little boat on the river on his mysterious journey.1

“Covid changed things everywhere. We were forbidden from going out and travelling, even to the local store when you wanted to go. People became less sociable, more isolated, stuck in their cages. In my case, the physical desert here became a human desert. You hardly saw another human being.

The Invisible

I joked back that maybe he needed to develop his powers of telepathy in order to reach the people he wanted to connect with. I told him a true story of premonitions and marauding ghosts.

“You know “, he replied thoughtfully, “My mother – who was, of course, the most wonderful of women – would say, “Don’t throw that hot water outside, son, or you’ll hurt them,” referring to the invisible presences around us. You were not to throw things out idly at the seemingly naked world.

Tahir had painted a finely executed, full length portrait of his mother when she was still young, clad in Kurdish dress and holding out the cup of life. More recently, one of his much-loved elder sisters had passed away and he drew her in spirit still vivid in her garment of light. We then refrained from speaking of loss because too much loss of life was going on in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. In just a week, Syria

would fall into the hands of former Al Qaeda and ISIS conquerors empowered by Turkey and its aggressive leader, Erdogan. [2] The jihadist forces of the Levant Liberation Committee – Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) were already on the move and had overtaken Aleppo even as we were talking. [3] They posed a significant threat to the freedom and security of the Syrian Kurds in their homeland in NE and NW Syria, operating hand in hand with their militant Turkish allies. [4] The entire country was now in grave danger of the excesses of fundamentalist Sunni Islam. [5]

Tahir was never one for religion having been beaten by mullahs with wet sticks when growing up in Kurdistan to make children learn the Koran. [6] The negative side of dogma still frequently features in his canvasses as unholy blemishes. In later life, he was looking back increasingly on Kurdish history and what is being lost, or forgotten, but that came out through the creative consciousness tapping into the universal in his work. The leaders have long neglected their artists unless they served their agenda. There was no point in going back. Home was no longer home.

Money, money, and more money

The Kurdish leaders got used to shaking the hands of Islamic fundamentalists like League of the Righteous’ (Asa’ib Ahl al Haq) notorious leader, Qais al-Khazali, in perpetuation of the power-sharing system. This system promised to deliver Iraq’s largest ever budget into their hands but has instead suffered bureaucratic obstacles.

According to Shafaq News, “In June 2023, Iraq’s Parliament approved a three-year general budget for 2023, 2024, and 2025, marking the largest budget in the nation’s history at approximately $153 billion annually. The Kurdistan Region is allocated 12.6% of the total… Member of the Iraqi Parliament’s Finance Committee, Moeen Al-Kazemi, clarified that “the government was supposed to submit the budget tables, especially since this budget lacks specific provisions except for Article 12, Section (C), which includes a recalculation of the cost of producing and transporting crude oil from the Kurdistan Region, now estimated at $16 per barrel.” [7]

Iraq has been seeking to lever control over the oil in the Kurdish region out of Kurdish hands and place it entirely under the central government. The wealth the KDP and PUK hierarchy has enjoyed since taking over the oil industry for the last twenty years has never been shared with the Kurdish people or used to benefit Kurdish society and culture, only those profiting from patronage relations enriched themselves. Basra’s oil revenues, by contrast, all went back to the state. But corruption still undermines the entire system.

How does this affect artists like Tahir? For his part he appears resigned to living out his days in exile, his work that enriches Kurdish history, beyond folklore, tragically ignored by the his own country.

Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a senior contributing writer for iKurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.

Copyright © 2025 Sheri Laizer, iKurd.net. All rights reserved

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