Poshya Kakil

Poshya Kakil is one of the most progressive young female performance artists currently working in Kurdistan-Iraq. Poshya graduated from the College of Fine Arts in Erbil in 2009 and her art deals directly with her identity as a Kurdish woman living in Iraq. Her performance work is about her living reality and reflects systems of kinship, gender, religion, barriers and borders. Painting, design, words, poems and drawing all contribute to how she develops her ideas into live actions. Despite geographical, cultural and border restrictions, she continues to collaborate with artists working in performance all over the world. In Kurdistan-Iraq, she has made a series of performance actions and films such as Knitting Iron, a film made at the women’s jail in Erbil supported by the Ministry of Youth and Culture.

Poshya has recently shown time-based and transmitted performance actions as part of CHAOS at Open Space, Victoria, Canada (2010), DISTANCE at Stoke Newington International Airport, London (2010), CHAOS with Bbeyond, Belfast (2010), ArTrend festival, Taiwan (2009), My Land festival, Croatia (2009 and 2011), as part of PAVES at the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow (2010) and at Liminal Space, curated by Sonya Dyer, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff.

In 2011 Poshya presented her film Knitting Iron alongside a performance detailing the unknitted lives of young girls led by Anne Bean at the BE Festival, Birmingham. The film then premiered at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast as part of a group show Others’ Stories curated by Peter Richards & Sarah McAvera. A DVD of Knitting Iron is published by Unbound at the Live Art Development Agency.

Below is documentation of time-based performances and installation works created by Poshya Kakil as part of CAUTION.