Huner Emin

Huner Emin is stateless Kurdish artist. He grew up in south Kurdistan/northern Iraq, based in Bloomington, Indiana. He studied Academic art in Erbil, Iraq, and moved to The United States to study MFA in Studio Art Painting at Marywood University.

During my MFA study, Huner performed an artwork called 180,000 Seconds in the memories of Kurdish victims of a genocide campaign conducted by the Baath regime between 1987 and 89. The number combines 50 hours that I divided into five days of standing on his feet in a memorial project for fallen victims of Baath's crime. The first two years of his life were during this military operation which was called Anfal Campaign.

In 1991 and after the first Gulf War in Iraq, hunger and his family, along with an estimated a million people, escaped to Turkey and Iran's borders in fear of the second genocide campaign. Huner's family is originally from that area of modern Turkey. So, he was a refugee in my own absent country. He and his family returned to Iraq after the International coalition effort to establish a No-Fly Zone in the north in Kurdish majority areas.

In 2013, he created and implemented an outreach art program called Art for Dumiz's Camp in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. It was a collective project that worked to integrate child refugees from Syria into their new society and support them in processing and expressing their living situation through art and creativity.

Since leaving Iraq in 2013, he has never returned due to political and social issues with the Iraqi and Kurdish governments in northern Iraq. During the Arab Spring, Huner performed an art piece called Geruk, questioning the power and the political dogma that caused his arrest twice between 2011-13 by authorities in northern Iraq. Between those two years, he was living in fear of the honor killing tradition. In 2017 Huner created an artwork that addresses this event of his life called Blood Washing.