Mountain as Witness

The mountain returns throughout these paintings not as scenery, but as a presence. It is distant and immediate at once: a place of refuge, endurance, passage and memory.

For Kurdish people, mountains hold a particular weight. They are bound to histories of displacement, survival and resistance, but they are also places that exceed any single story. In these works, I do not try to describe a fixed landscape or a recognisable geography. The mountains shift through colour, gesture and accumulation. Their forms become unstable, fractured or luminous; they hold darkness, movement and atmosphere.

Painting allows me to approach landscape as something emotional rather than documentary. The surface carries traces of building, covering and returning. Colour becomes a way of holding contradiction.

The mountain becomes a witness. It remains when people are forced to leave, when histories are ignored, and when memory becomes difficult to carry. It is not passive. It watches, shelters and endures.

These paintings sit between place and feeling. They ask what a landscape can remember, and what it means to look toward something that has outlasted the people, borders and events around it.