We are pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition “Human Condition” on Friday, October 6th, at 8:00 PM. The exhibition is curated by Marko Stamenković and features the work of Shwan Dler Qaradaki and Behjat Omer Abdulla. Admission is free, and the exhibition will be open for viewing until November 2, 2023.
Qaradaki and Abdolla are considered central figures in the development of Scandinavian understanding of the complexity of life and survival in conflict zones in general, particularly in the context of Kurdish history and the Kurdish population, both in the Middle East and in the diaspora.
Human Condition, an exhibition first held in 2015 at the Tenthaus Project Space in Oslo, brings together two visual artists from the autonomous Kurdistan region of Northern Iraq, Behjat Omer Abdulla and Shwan Dler Qaradaki, based in Sweden and Norway respectively. Through a body of work created over the last decade in a variety of media (including drawing, video, and intaglio prints on paper), the exhibition’s title refers to their own experience of political refugees in Europe and the sense of identification with Hannah Arendt’s eponimous book and her loss of freedom under the Nazi regime during World War II. By making this connection explicit, Abdulla and Qaradaki build their work around one central notion – the notion of violence – understood as a category of visual knowledge.
