31 - Kurdish Art and Cultural Production

Summary

“This chapter analyses Kurdish cultural and artistic work. For much of the twentieth century, Kurdish cultural and artistic productions were repressed by the assimilationist policies the states of Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria adopted with respect of their Kurdish population. One of the most intriguing contributions of this chapter is its emphasis on artistic and cultural production within the actual political arena, interrogating how it contributes to the transformation of the new Kurdish subjectivity that situates itself across borders. The questions underpinning this research investigate how through counter-cultural and artistic efforts create or rather recreate a cognitive territory of an oppressed people.Artistic production for Kurds signifies the memory of a stateless people and a decolonial aesthetic trying to survive amids the hegemony of the dominant national cultures and the traumas of the repression of Kurdish micro-culture. Hence, analysing the participation of contemporary artists and producers in the Kurdish area in the midst of conflict and violence enables us to highlight the emancipatory capacity of their work. During the 1990s and 2000s, theatre, music, cinema festivals began to be held in European countries, which also extended to the four parts of the Kurdish territories, leading to the propagation of both intergenerational and trans-border artistic and cultural activities. This reterritorialization of Kurdish counter-cultural memory may not be a renaissance of Kurdish cultural production but instead should be considered a cultural serhildan.”