What can Kurdish art tell us about Anfal?

The essential aim of genocide is to exterminate and completely destroy a certain group so that no one tells the story of their death and destruction in order to completely erase their names and memory from the ground. But one of the most important aspects of remembering and keeping the victims alive is to tell their stories through art. If in other times, art creates beauty and gives us pleasure, what role and efficiency does it have in the dark times, homelessness, war and genocide? What can art do when the horror of war and genocide comes to speak? What can Kurdish art tell us about Anfal? Has Kurdish art been able to create a national memory for Anfal? The aim of this research is to show the role of art in the dark times of war and genocide and the role of Kurdish art in telling the memory of Anfal. In this paper, I argue that on the one hand, art can awaken forgotten memories and create a collective memory. Because in the dark times, art can archive, document and record atrocities. It also would reveal and criticize the truth of the dark times. As a result, art can take responsibility, but without giving up its own artistic features. On the other hand, Kurdish artists commemorate the victims of Anfal through their artworks, tell their stories, document their lives, resumption their experiences, and paint their endless journeys with color and drawing. They tell the memory and experience of their own people and the memory of the Anfal survivors in order to bring about a collective memory from a personal memory. This paper is divided into two parts: First, the relationship between genocide, art and memory. Second, Anfal in Kurdish art. It applies the Critical Analysis method to assess the relationship between genocide, art, memory and Anfal in Kurdish art.