Bio

Rebeen Hamarafiq 

Also known as: Rebeen Majeed, Reben Majeed or Rebeen Majed

(Due to changes of the orders of the names when he started to exhibit outside Iraq ).

A Kurdish Iraqi artist, curator, and researcher who has dedicated his work to exploring the relationship between daily living and art, the social construction of power and meaning, the body’s reaction to norms and modern living, and the re-habitation of Iraqi society after random destruction by wars and the fast changes of the after Saddam’s era.

He is a PhD student at the AKBILD Vienna, studied MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London and has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including at Showroom London, Alternativa Gdansk, Cal Art LA, and Museo di Roma in Trastevere. He has also curated several projects, including Dado, Sulaymanyah, video zoom Kurdistan Iraq, Museo di Roma in Trastevere, and “Are We Addicted?” - a one-year project inside a culture factory.

In addition to his work as an artist and curator, he has published articles on visual culture in local magazines and his latest article was published in Genocide Studies International by University of Toronto Press. He has received several grants and residencies, including the CIMAM, Spotlight Iraq award by the Goethe-Institut and a Live Art and Arts Admin residency in London.

His relation with art started when he was six years old and had to accompany his blind uncle who also had a great influence on him, to sell cigarettes and other goods in front of the Institute of Fine Art - the only place to study art in Iraqi Kurdistan. In 1994, he became a student at the same institute. His relation to the intellectual body was mainly through his family, who were secretly part of the communist groups in the city. The year he became a student at the institute was the start of the civil war between Kurdish parties, which destroyed the utopian dream of nationalism, democracy, communism, and all other dreams built around the little Kurdish government. It was also the start of a new type of thinking among smaller groups of artists, poets, writers, and activists, who gathered to make exhibitions, activities, and seminars. His works were located outside the main parties’ opposing agendas spread through cultural bodies.