Shwan Dler Qaradaki
From above
5.6.– 30.8.2026
This exhibition by Shwan Dler Qaradaki (b. 1977, Slemani, Kurdistan) brings together the new large-scale watercolor drawing series From Above alongside works from the earlier project Halo of Shame, creating a dialogue between two interconnected bodies of work that reflect on violence, displacement, language, and collective memory.
Across the exhibition, personal and historical experiences intersect with broader political structures, exploring how systems of power shape both landscapes and human lives. Through watercolor drawings, the works examine not only the visible consequences of violence, but also the ways in which memory, language, and cultural identity persist in its aftermath.
Qaradaki's visual language moves fluidly between figuration and symbolism. Recognizable forms dissolve into dreamlike or allegorical imagery, allowing the works to exist simultaneously within personal memory and collective history. Animals, landscapes, fragments of architecture, and symbolic objects appear repeatedly, carrying layered meanings that shift between political reference and poetic association. This fluidity between the figurative and the symbolic creates spaces of ambiguity in which violence is not represented directly, but through metaphor, fragmentation, and emotional resonance. The works avoid documentary description in favor of images that evoke states of uncertainty, displacement, and psychological rupture.
Watercolor itself plays a significant role within this visual language. The medium’s transparency and instability mirror the fragility of memory and the precariousness of histories that risk disappearance. Pigment bleeds, dissolves, and accumulates in ways that echo processes of erasure and persistence. Delicate surfaces coexist with drawn images of devastation, producing tensions between vulnerability and endurance. Through this material approach, the works explore how painting can hold both intimacy and political urgency simultaneously.
The works become more than settings; they function as witnesses and repositories of memory. Scars left upon the earth mirror the psychological and collective traces carried across generations. In this way, the works reflect on how violence repeats itself historically, reappearing in new forms while remaining embedded in cultural consciousness and lived experience. The images resist the normalization of destruction by slowing down the act of looking and insisting on forms of emotional and historical presence.
In the new series From Above, metallic birds move across skies suspended above landscapes that appear at once silent and devastated. Beneath them unfold fragmented terrains, stacked bodies, ruins, and traces of collapse. The works investigate forms of vertical power in which violence is exercised remotely through military, technological, and ideological systems. The aerial perspective becomes central: from above, destruction risks becoming abstract, reduced to images, data, or distant spectacle, while the ground below remains the site where vulnerability, grief, and human consequences are lived and endured. Qaradaki points toward how contemporary warfare increasingly operates through distance and surveillance, creating asymmetries between those who observe and those who are exposed.
Throughout the watercolor drawings, gestures of resistance and survival emerge in quieter registers. In one of the works, the image moves into an unstable and allegorical landscape where architectural fragments, ornamental forms, and animalistic figures collide within the same visual space. Beneath skies filled with dark mechanical forms and circling birds, wolf-like creatures appear in states of confrontation and collective unrest, pointing toward experiences shaped by fear, domination, and survival.
The new works can be understood as a continuation and expansion of Halo of Shame, a multidisciplinary project centered on language loss, cultural suppression, and identity. While From Above broadens toward reflections on warfare, technological violence, and historical repetition, Halo of Shame originated from the historical marginalization of Kurdish language and culture. At its core it is inspired by the letters of the Kurdish alphabet. These letters appear not simply as linguistic signs, but as fragile visual traces of a culture subjected to fragmentation, prohibition, and erasure across generations.
Within Halo of Shame, language is approached not only as communication, but as a carrier of memory, belonging, and historical continuity. The suppression of language becomes inseparable from the suppression of identity itself. The works reflect on how the loss or silencing of language produces forms of cultural exile, in which histories and experiences become increasingly difficult to transmit. At the same time, the project insists on the possibility of reclaiming visibility through artistic practice. The watercolor drawings become alternative forms of inscription through which erased narratives can re-emerge in visual form.
Across both series, a hybrid visual vocabulary unfolds in which elements from Western art history intersect with Islamic miniature traditions and Kurdish symbolism. The compositions often reject fixed spatial perspective, allowing multiple temporalities and symbolic registers to coexist within the same image. Motifs such as snakes, doves, landscapes, apples, and fragments of the body recur throughout the works, carrying associations that move between personal memory and collective trauma. In particular, the apple functions as a recurring reference to the chemical attacks against Kurdish populations in the late 1980s. These recurring symbols operate not as fixed codes, but as shifting carriers of memory that connect intimate experience with larger political histories.
Through From Above and Halo of Shame, the artist explores how art can function as an alternative language when conventional forms of speech prove insufficient. The exhibition creates a space in which fragmented histories, suppressed memories, and experiences of displacement can be preserved, transformed, and reimagined. Rather than offering fixed narratives, the works invite viewers into a layered visual field where memory, violence, and resistance remain in constant negotiation. In doing so, the exhibition reflects on the capacity of images to carry what cannot always be fully spoken: grief, survival, historical rupture, and the enduring desire for cultural continuity.
Curated by Malin Barth