Ismail Khayat: An Artistic Help Scream Rising from Mesopotamia

Written by Kerem Muldur

Humans used the arts to express their experiences, their emotions, and to reflect their own approach to their life and social topics that go on. The Middle East, where conflict and chaos have continued for centuries, is making its people go through lots of happenings from genocides to wars, wealth to misery, which means it's a perfect place for an artist to be more and more creative.

Ismail Khayat was one of those artists from the Middle East who turned this chaotic situation to his advantage and articulated his life and his people’s sufferings, happinesses, and events they have gone through. In this article, we will delve into his world and artworks, investigating what factors triggered Khayat’s creativity and what methods he uses to reflect the topic he treats.

Ismail Khayat was born in 1944 in the city of Khanaquin, near the Iranian border, where the Luri dialect is spoken. Later on, he moved to Sulaymaniyah at the beginning of the 1960s. As a child, it was apparent that he was gifted: he was often found by his parents drawing on the walls or floors of his home. He was a natural artist and developed an instinctual practice^[1]. Khayat taught painting, drawing, performance, and theatre, inspiring students. He was also a prolific producer of his own work: He used a broad range of media, including ink, watercolor, charcoal, colored pencils, as well as oil on canvas, paper, wood, and fabric. He produced some 4,000 paintings and more than 3,000 stone paintings^[2]. He had many exhibitions of international acclaim, in Syria, Jordan, the US, France, Japan, Sweden, the Soviet Union, and South Korea. After 24 years in public schools, he was promoted to plastic arts director in the Ministry of Culture for the Kurdistan Regional Government. In 2017 and 2018, Khayat served as the artist in residence at the American University of Iraq in Sulaymaniyah.

Ismail Khayat was primarily influenced by imagination, storytelling, lived experience, and observation. He took inspiration from his surroundings, painting childhood memories of nature around his home, especially fish, birds, and wild animals. While sociopolitical happenings like Anfal Genocide, peace themes, and women, seeing them as the source of energy and aliveness in the world, was his thematical influences, Kurdish folklore and traditional symbols infuse his work culturally, like the evil eye; the hamsa, an emblem containing a right hand with an eye; and the tree of life. He frequently used birds to depict freedom and the fragility of life. In one series expressing the persecution of Iraqi Kurds, he depicted ghostly birds rising from the bodies of the dead. He primarily used oil painting on different media such as canvas, wood, and stone. He issued political tensions during his lifetime, and genocides happened at this time, like at Anfal. He also paints children and women a lot, seeing them as the source of energy and aliveness in the world. He usually emphasized bird metaphors for the themes of anti-war and peace. We will delve into 2 of the most important artworks, discovering different themes with different media and techniques. 

Starting from 1986, the Iraqi government under the Saddam Hussein regime started a series of attacks against Kurdish people, mostly civilians, called the Al-Anfal Operation, referring to the Anfal surah. In the aftermath of this cruel attack, it is estimated that 150,000 people lost their lives. As an artist sensitive about the sociopolitical issues, Ismail Khayat produced a series of eight different paintings of masks, each one having a different color, created with colorful pencil on paper in 2006. Anfal masks represent what happened to the Kurds during the genocide, and each face represents a place or a victim in that area.

Ismail Khayat turned the endless chaos and conflict of the Middle East into a rich source of artistic inspiration, using his work to express not only his personal emotions but also the collective experiences of his people. From his early fascination with animals and nature to his later engagement with sociopolitical events such as the Anfal genocide, Khayat consistently reflected on the struggles, dreams, and resilience of the Kurdish people. His usage of different media and symbolic imagery, such as birds representing freedom or masks representing loss, further shows his mastery in turning suffering into powerful visual narratives with metaphors. Khayat's artworks stand as a loud and colorful scream of the Kurds to the world, embodying both their pain and their hope. Through his pieces, he invites us to witness a history marked by survival and reminds us of the unstoppable spirit of creativity even in the darkest times.

References:

1. Seaman, A. (2022, September 14). A lasting impression: Ismail Khayat — Anna Seaman. Anna Seaman. https://annaseaman.net/content/a-lasting-impression-ismail-khayat?utm

2. Ismail Khayat, Kurdish artist, dies at 78. (2024, October 5). New York Kurdish Cultural Center - Promoting Kurdish culture from all parts of Kurdistan and the diaspora. https://nykcc.org/ismail-khayat-kurdish-artist-dies-at-78/