Artists in Iraq are becoming more isolated as government funding dries up and an increasingly conservative society and middle-class emigration leads to a shrinking market for art. Jane Arraf investigates.
Hussein Adel is a struggling young artist sharing a tiny bedsit and living on take-out sandwiches. But the car horns blaring on the busy Baghdad street outside are a reminder that he is living his dream.
“Baghdad is where everything is happening – it’s like New York,” he says, surrounded by his paintings and sketches on the bed he and his two roommates take turns sharing.
Adel was 15 when his father, who had himself dreamed of studying art, brought him here from the provincial southern city of Nasriyah to enrol in Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts. “He stayed with me for two months and then he said: ‘You can take care of yourself better than I can. If I stay with you, you won’t become a man,’” says Adel.
The diminutive young man with a tangle of curly hair has just turned 20 and is in his final year at the academy. To help pay the rent he sells cartoons to newspapers for $15 each. They are social and political commentary – in one the snakelike tongue of a corpulent politician reaches out to lick the lollipop of a child wearing threadbare clothing. In another, a piper promising paradise calls Isis suicide bombers to their death... Keep reading on The Observer
Hussein Adel is a struggling young artist sharing a tiny bedsit and living on take-out sandwiches. But the car horns blaring on the busy Baghdad street outside are a reminder that he is living his dream.
“Baghdad is where everything is happening – it’s like New York,” he says, surrounded by his paintings and sketches on the bed he and his two roommates take turns sharing.
Adel was 15 when his father, who had himself dreamed of studying art, brought him here from the provincial southern city of Nasriyah to enrol in Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts. “He stayed with me for two months and then he said: ‘You can take care of yourself better than I can. If I stay with you, you won’t become a man,’” says Adel.
The diminutive young man with a tangle of curly hair has just turned 20 and is in his final year at the academy. To help pay the rent he sells cartoons to newspapers for $15 each. They are social and political commentary – in one the snakelike tongue of a corpulent politician reaches out to lick the lollipop of a child wearing threadbare clothing. In another, a piper promising paradise calls Isis suicide bombers to their death... Keep reading on The Observer