EMAD DHAHIR

Emad was born in 1964 in Baghdad, Iraq, and later received his Bachelor of Sculpture degree from the University of Baghdad in 1989. After living in Jordan from 1994 to 2005, he decided to relocate to Australia.

In Emad’s words:

"The main sources of inspiration for my sculptural body of work comes from  the mythology of my own culture – the ancient Mesopotamia which are blended with rituals of my daily life – my dreams and my memories."

"I borrow the beauty from formal and aesthetic qualities of old ancient sculptures as well as the languages and forms of modern sculpture such as those of Giacometti, transforming them into new contemporary language and spicing them with an ‘Iraqi style’.

this ‘style’ often contains and interprets serious subject matter in form and content which provide to my sculptures different humanistic and aesthetic qualities.

while facing these honestly-made, small-size sculptures, the viewer should comprehend that they are just a creative and playful foundation for bigger sculptural artistic projects waiting to be created in public space."