"Every painting explores some aspect of my life. They deal with my thoughts and feelings about life, my relationships with my family, friends and others as well as my inspiration, attitudes, dreams and hopes"

Entirely self-taught European Kurdish artist Ilyas Kirkan was born in Turkey 1972, brought up in Denmark, and has been living and working in London since summer 1997. Kirkan has had numerous exhibitions in diverse cities such as Copenhagen, Paris, Antwerp, Brighton, Beirut, Montreal, Tokyo and London.

Maybe you would like to know …
Why pasting?
Why sand?

Pasting means dividing. Like dividing my life into small pieces to separate them and rebuild something else. Dividing is also a spontaneous reaction that one can have in daily life. When meeting someone, for example, it is not rare not to concentrate on the whole person, but rather, the attention can be fractioned on a physical aspect, the voice, the movements, the words … That is a subconscious attitude.

I paste my memories on canvas. On some of them, I left chaotic memories from my childhood. Which was disrupted by several changes: changes of countries, cultures, surroundings and languages.

When I paste, I try to catch the moment. By pasting the first pages of “Le Monde” for example I catch moments of that day on my canvas. Certain pages of magazines or newspapers also constitute a source of inspiration for my work.

That is the same process with sand and gravel, which I collect from different cities and paste. It fixes a place where I have been and which will then live with me on the canvas.

Why all those languages? What does European Kurdish mean?

Those languages are part of my past and present life. My parents’ only language is Kurdish. During my childhood I learnt Turkish and Danish as foreign languages. Even though and I would like to underline this, I consider this as lucky today! At the time that was a source of problems and personal dilemmas. Although Turkish isn’t my mother tongue the Danish Government set us to learn it as we were from Turkey. Other dilemmas existed, such as the new way of life, as well as traditions and religion especially its practice and mostly the refusal to practice it.

I am the youngest of nine children. The eldest are illiterate, which means they can’t either read or write. However, the youngest are educated and cosmopolitan. From those age and history differences a gap appeared between us that the language is no more able to fill. That is the reason why I tried another way of coming back to my parents and to express myself, in order to find them again other than through dialogue, which has become so hard between us.

In this new language, I have eventually found a way to express my feelings and dreams that would sound too complex and tortuous if I put them in words.