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On this spaceship that we call earth, the reality that we believe to know, appears to me in some way limited and diminished, above all thinking about that parallel dimension and the vanishing of the universe, without time, without borders, made of past skies where the poetry and the language of the art are hiding: “…the stars are sweet books of verses that pass in the mute silence towards the reign of nothing writing strophes in the silver sky” (Garcia Lorca).
For this, perhaps, in front of apparently common events like the variation of seasons, the force of a sunset, or the fury of a sea storm, I feel often overwhelmed, nearly astonished; and every time I wonder if this inadequacy of my “Being-in-the-world” is not a defect, neither a lack. It returns to my mind that, indeed, nourishing astonishment and stupor, it is just this inadequacy maintaining my solitary dream.
Like a lost astronaut, astonished and fascinated, I have left and crossed part of this small great unknown universe, carrying only with me the backpack from my father, the same which had belonged to my grandfathers and where there was a place for feelings, impulses, emotions and experiences of that world. Another world. And from the deep Kurdistan till the grey roofs of Utrecht, after having left behind the different types of white from the snow of my land, I have known the insane blue of the Mediterranean, the delicacy of Tuscan hills and the vibrating greys of the Dutch skies.
For my studies, after the Institute of Fine Arts of Baghdad, I attended the Academies of Rome and Florence, visiting as many museums as possible of the European art cities and those of the New World. This is why my background, compared with an European artist, is complex and various. A diversity that I share through every piece of my work with the ones that today live around me.
Baldin Ahmed 2009
53th Biennale of Venice, Italy