Memories in Time

Memories in Time
Still and Moving Image
Length: 35 Seconds (on loop)
Exhibited at: Contemporary Video Exhibition, Surface gallery, Nottingham, 14-27 April 2011
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Memories in Time, is an attempt to investigate the historical dimension of the the human suffering. In this video work I have deployed a moving images in a contrast to a still image to facilitate a dialogue with the events that had a big impact on my life.

I am taking a journey back to Halabja, sitting on an empty door steps, next to the fossilised bodies of a child and father; wanting to have a long discussion, listening to their endless stories. I also want to tell my endless stories.

The continued movement of the paper plain is to represent my constant feeling of compulsory divorce from my past. The paper plain conveys a multiplicative representation; representing the pure childhood that I was denied of, when the real airplanes came in hundreds with poisonous chemical weapons to kill every living being in Halabja. It is representing myself, the games that I played with my childhood friends, children's representation of wars, destruction, but also children's imagination and the desire to explore, the surrounding.

At the time of the attack, I was studying away from Halabja and my family. I escaped the death, but I feel that one part of me is buried with my people in Halabja and the other part is still writing down the memories of destroyed hopes and the hopes that grow high everyday.

The translated poem that was written after 1988, represents a generation after the tragedy, the generation that tried to communicate the event,providing an emotional and logical response to the tragedy of Halabja as a fragment of the human suffering in the current system.