We are delighted to announce the first solo exhibition with works by Fatima Barznge in our gallery. Fatima Barznge is a visual artist born in Iraqi Kurdistan. She relocated to the Netherlands in 1997.

 

Her art practice reflects on her culture of origin, combining material and immaterial elements with aspects of Western abstract-geometric art. Since her childhood she was in contact with art forms of high symbolic content, mainly calligraphy, which has the same prominence in Islamic art as religious paintings in Western art history.

 

She incorporates her passion for textile art, inherent in Kurdish culture, into the design of her work where elements such as repetition, rhythm and movement are core aspects. Old and new visual elements blend together. She carefully explores and revisits her memories of Aghjalar, a place destroyed by Saddam Hussein's troops in 1988, which was later reconstructed. Throughout the years she ventures on a journey to explore herself and what she left behind in the place of her childhood. The region appeared to her as a new environment in which places, rituals, language and architecture take on a different connotation than the ones that are familiar from her memories. It inspires her to extract details and recast pictorial elements to a reduced form where the foreground and background blend in such a way that the space between them is compressed into an abstract image.

 

Sofie Verbrugghen & Olaf Pradhan