Rushdi Anwar
Rushdi Anwar with his work Past in the Present, which has been purchased by
the Australian War Memorial. Photo: Rohan Thomson
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Rushdi Anwar
When people ask Rushdi Anwar why his art is filled with violence, his answer is that he has no choice.
Growing up in the Kurdish autonomous region of Iraq, war was a part of everyday life, and although he has lived in Australian since 1998, the memories have never left him. His experiences have been a part of his artwork ever since, and will now form part of the narrative of war in Australia in the Australian War Memorial's art collection.
The memorial recently bought one of Anwar's photographic installations, each image part of a representation of the aftermath of the 1988 gas attack on the population of Halabja, the artist's home town.
''It was constantly a space of violence, of conflict. When I was a child it was Kurdish freedom fighters with the Iraqi government, then it was the Iraqi-Iranian war, then the Iraqi army against Kurdish fighters, and then the first Gulf War,'' he said. ''The reason to leave that country was uncertainty and instability. It was basically that life was just shaky, and you lived your life day to day, and everything was unsettled, you didn't know what was going to come tomorrow, in all aspects of life.''
In the installation, he has treated the photographs with sandpaper, as a reference to ethnic cleansing, and smoke, to symbolise the haze and lack of clarity that has come to define the Iraqi regime.
He said he had tried to move away from violent themes in his work, but could not.
''To be honest, I tried to avoid that and I tried to forget that, but it didn't go away. I felt like the past, sometimes even if you don't like it, is a part of us. We inherit it, unfortunately,'' he said. ''Once I came across one of the audience in Turkey and they asked me why I was doing this, why I didn't paint flowers. And I said I was in a place where [flowers] did not exist - if I saw a flower, I would paint a flower.''
The memorial acquired the work after head of art Ryan Johnston saw Anwar's work in an exhibition in Sydney. Mr Johnston said the memorial was currently focused on developing the cultural diversity of its art collection. ''[Anwar's] experience of the war in Iraq is very, very different to the way it's represented in the collection at the moment,'' Mr Johnston said.
''It broadens the way you can tell these stories, but also increases our audience appeal, because there's a whole generation of Kurdish Australians now who would like to be able to come here and see their story told.''
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