Al Mandalawi: It is unfair that we were not given the opportunity to study in our mother tongue. This is a cultural rape
- KurdishMedia.com - By Suzan Quitaz
- 21/10/2001 00:00:00
The Movements on an Artist’s Brain
“What is art and what is not?” is a question that is as fascinating as it is eternal. When we see, feel, touch, think, remember, dream and create, we use our cultural icons and languages. Amongst these languages, art holds a particularly visible and privileged position. How do things come to have meaning and value? By looking at a painting, for example, we can begin to understand the way our representations acquire meanings and power. As with story-tellers, artists can describe what we have produced and who we are.
Think of a strong feeling that you have and have never told anyone about. In order to communicate this feeling, you must use a language.
To realise oneself in a sense, to be or to exist as an individual, one must enter a cultural world. One must use cultural codes and languages. In this sense, one’s identity is founded upon that which is beyond one’s self.
Ali Mandalawi has been speaking the language of art since he was a four-year old child. He says, for him works of art are the absolute property, a surrogate for and realization of his essential self. He says, art happens when thoughts, feelings and dreams gather into a deliberate statement.
He loves his work to a degree that often he spends all night long painting. Painting for him means a joyful journey of adventures and continuation. “I love all the colours of art. I enjoy painting for children, landscapes, cartoons and everything,” he confirms.
Who is Ali Mandalawi, anyway?
Mandalawi was born in 1958 in village call Mandali, in South Kurdistan. Mandalawi, graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in 1979, and in 1986 graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad. Everything about his life and personality, not only his works of art, is fascinating. He is like his art, colourful, mysterious and full of life and thoughts.
His journey and friendship with scattered papers and coloured pens, curved lines, squares, circles and spirals began when he was four years old. Papers and coloured pens are his true friends. “They are friends with whom I have never gotten bored. I love painting everywhere and anywhere. I often paint all night long. It is the joy of my life,” Mandalawi believes.
I wondered when and how this friendship began.
“This fine friendship started when I was still a little child,” he recalls. “As a child, I was struck by many childhood diseases. So I often spent endless hours and days in bed and passed the time by reading loads of children magazines. The colours and the paintings fascinated me so much that I started to create my own world of art,” Mandalawi elaborates.
But this was not the only reason why he started to paint. Art develops in conjunction with a revolutionary transformation of the way in which an individual conceives his or her humanity within the culture that he or she lives.
“I was raised in the ‘green river-land’. Mandali is a very beautiful village. It has had a strong influence on me as an artist and as a person. This green-blue environment had enriched my art with joyful colours.”
Yellows, oranges, reds and green colours play a focal role in Mandalawi’s paintings. The mountains, villages and the lakes have a special place in his heart. These are images that can be traced to Kurdistan, he explains. Perhaps this is what I mean by Kurdish art. The art is a reflection of cultural background and the environment that surrounds them. The beautiful nature of Kurdistan is well traced in Mandalawi’s art. “I make my art Kurdish through enriching them with joyful colours,” Mandalawi believes.
Cultural Rape
“In the modern Western liberal democracy, individuals are free to think, no longer a subject under the power of the sovereign. They are the king of their own kingdom, and the master of their own fate, body and mind. But we artists from the Third World are still oppressed by our regimes. They not only control our thoughts, but also but confine our arts. Art is subject to time, and its creation lies on the hands of artists.”
Despite these restrictions and oppressions, Mandalawi has succeeded in shedding light on this oppression. One of his paintings, the Wall (Diwar), is a living proof of that oppression. The painting is a product of the censoring and tyranny of individual free will.
Mandalawi wants to tell the people of the world the tragic reality of his people through pictorial language and colours. The Wall is one of a kind; each object is both a part of the whole, and a world in itself. Each part is removed from its context to take a part in a new creative whole, words on colours.
Mandalawi, came into contact with oppression at a very early stage of his life. “I was brought up in Mandali, a village with over 90% of its population as Kurds. We spoke Kurdish at home, in the street and everywhere else. Everything about my world in Mandali was Kurdish: culture, the customs and the way of thinking,” Mandalawi confirms.
“At the age of five, I started school, and from that time, I come in contact with a world that was different to mine, a cold reality. The teaching at school was in a language that I neither understood nor spoke. Arabic was imposed on us.”
“It is unfair that we were not given the opportunity to study in our mother tongue. This is a cultural rape, that we millions of Kurds were force to adopt another nation’s language and were expected to abandon our own language,” Mandalawi expresses passionately.
But this did not mean that Mandalawi has departed from his Kurdish identity. He was and is still proud of being Kurdish. And he successfully expresses his Kurdicity through his art; his colours are particularly Kurdish. Kurds are very keen on bright colours. They love yellow, red and green. These colours could easily be traced in Mandalawi’s art.
Being Kurdish is an important element of Mandalawi’s life and art. “Being Kurdish does not only live in my art; it lives in my heart and in the way I think. I am the son of Kurdistan’s soil, and will never imagine myself having another identity. I am proud of my origin, and I symbolise my Kurdish identify through my art.”
He believes that one can achieve a great deal through art. We Kurds had been lost in dark holes of the history. We are unknown victims, subject to terror and oppression. But we can promote ourselves in many ways, of which art is one.
Mandalawi challenged the political map of the Middle East. “Kurdistan was born before Iraq. I have written extensively of the tragic division of Kurdistan. I am very optimistic and do not think it is beyond belief that one day we, Kurds, will join as one national state. One day, we shall be kings of our kingdom. We will decide our fate, realize our freedom and start to experience it.”
Mandalawi’s Contributions
Mandalawi’s art spans a diverse spectrum. It ranges from caricatures to children books and portraits. His art is often profiled in international publications. Often he would paint the portrait, especially that of artists, and then the writer would inspire a story from it.
Naz, a cartoon character by Mandalawi
Mandalawi’s personification is of a contemporary pattern. It neither stresses the shape of the figure as physical entity nor limits itself to capturing the temporal moment in order to preserve the action of the personality.
His 37 personalities exhibition has given a new face to art and literature. “I was involved in the work through which I tried to disclose some hidden facts I have made,” Mandalawi informs.
The way works of art are reproduced through medium such as photographs, postcards and books is very similar to the way our reality is always mediated by cultural institutions. Mandalawi goes further, “photographs are ‘frozen’ and ‘limited’ to certain moments.” Yet his portraits consist of more than one aspect of life. Apart from the present features, he also shows the past, similar to the way individuals would think or behave.
Najeeb Mehfuz
Mandalawi has worked for the Iraqi Children’s Culture Department for many years, and has painted 30 children’s books - books that have been loved by children and have been appreciated by intellectuals.
He has opened seven sole art exhibitions in Sulemani (South Kurdistan), Baghdad, Tunis and The Netherlands. And he has had more than 20 joint exhibitions both in the Arab world and internationally.
His personalities one-man show was held in Baghdad for the first time in 1986 and was a very unique exhibition. It was a living proof of his ability and creativity and presented a fair depiction of him as a man and as an artist.
The personalities exhibition comes to present new answers to an old question concerning the depiction of human figures.
His His personal collections include a number of writers and critiques such as Jameel Sidqi al-Zahawi a Kurdish poet, Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian novelist and the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature and many other famous personalities.
Mandalawi paints for a weekly publication and for the last two years has been working as a first class cartoonist for the daily Arabic newspaper, Sharq al-Wast.
He admits that making people laugh is not always his priority. Rather, he scrutinizes each of his characters and works on those that he can depict.
In the near future, Ali al-Mandalawi will hold an exhibition in London that will honour the victims of Halabja.
Ali Mandalawi: a self-biography
- KurdishMedia.com - By Suzan Quitaz
- 21/10/2001 00:00:00