Images Unseen

We focus on the striking artworks by the Shingali Ezidi artist, Kheder H. Daham, who escaped from the Da’esh genocide in 2014 to come and live in France. His works show an experimental vision, underlining how “atrocity arts” navigate traditions and terrors, and how they are born out of the necessity of expressions as well as material resources to hand. As exiled minorities, they are testimony to how subaltern talent is overlooked by established art worlds both in the “homeland” as well as overseas.

Those who are suddenly subjugated to the threat of violence and forced to move homes, take their loved ones with them and any life essential supplies they can get their hands on in the few minutes that they have to walk or, more pressingly, run into the unknown. For 53-year-old Kheder H. Daham, his paintings were among his life-sustaining essentials.

When Daesh were on their way towards Shingal in north Iraq in 2014, he was in the village Sharyi near the city of Mosul with his family in their ancestral village, Dukhir. Kheder grabbed as many canvases as he could, rolled them up and put them into his hold-all as he joined his family to escape Daesh. The Islamic extremists flashing their formidable weapons and vehicles—many purloined from Iraqi military check points—raced towards Shingali villages like a juggernaut of black-flagged ferocity. Those Ezidi that did not run for their life either lost it or were held captive in humiliating and tortuous chambers.

‘Sailing in the Unknown Ocean’ by Kheder H Daham

Now living in a small town in southeast France where he sought asylum with his family in 2015, Kheder reflects back on the atrocities through art, a genocide where over thousands of men were killed and even more women and children held captive as slaves to Da’esh design. With limited means once in exile and not enough funds to buy paints, Kheder started painting by dipping his paint brush into coffee mulch so that it acted like a stain once on canvas. Then he smeared the coffee colours in masterly strokes to create contour and shadow to portray men, women and children petrified in disfigured distress. Despite such innovations, Kheder is little known outside the local Ezidi community, largely because he has no agent, nor is he proficient as selling his artworks on social media.

Kheder in his house. Photograph by Raminder Kaur

A Munch-like terror is evoked by the open mouths and terrified eyes that figure in many of these “coffee paintings” as with “The Cry of Ezidi Women: Roots of the Sun Enduring after Genocide”, “The Crying Child from Shingal” and “Khojo Scream”.

The latter refers to the massacre of hundreds of men and the abduction of thousands of women and children on August 15th, 2014, among whom was the Nobel Prize For Peace awardee, Nadia Murad. Some of the images of terror rest alongside Ezidi archetypes such as the sacred Lalish temples and Shingal mountain and cultural traditions such as performers with saz (stringed instrument) and those with a bilur (flute).

‘The Ezidis: Roots of the Sun Enduring After the Genocide’ by Kheder H Daham

One time in 2021, Kheder took to channeling his creativity into concrete. What resulted was a stunning assemblage of both tradition and terror. With a frail female figure holding her hand out in front, the statue proclaims ‘Arrete le Genocide Yezidis’ (“Stop the Ezidi Genocide”). Even though more than a sum of its parts, he explained each of its components:

“On the top is the sun, sacred to Ezidi religion. It radiates 24 short and long rays reflecting the hours of day and night. Within the sun are etched the Shingal mountains and the temples of the Ezidi holy centre in Lalish. Underneath is a dove flying away in fear surrounded by leaves of a fig tree, symbolic of Shingal. The woman’s hair stands on end on the top of her head, morphing into the branches of a tree. Her eyes, necklace and earrings too are in the shape of the radiating sun, the eyes arched by wheat-like eye brows and underneath over hollow cheeks, tears streaming down to a baby in her arms who also holds up a hand in the gesture of stopping the genocide.

Statue shouting ‘Arrete le Genocide Yezidis’ by Kheder H Daham. 

The woman has long plaits that descend down her frail body, ending up as chains around her scrawny skeletal feet. On the pedestal are moulds of swords and scimitars indicative of earlier genocides and the 74th being in 2014 indicated by semi-automatic machine guns. The weapons, however, are underneath her feet as a sign of her resilience despite all the violence. In front of her is a tough path indicating that although difficult the road is clear to go forwards. At the base of the statue are emblems of Ezidi cultural and everyday life such as musical instruments and vegetables grown in the soils of Shingal.”

The metre-high figure on a square tablet is a striking visual testimony to the 2014 genocide and its ongoing nature with the still missing women and children, split families, the recurrent nightmares and trauma that plagued the mind, body and spirit, risks of deportation as refugees, the lack of access to a safe and secure homeland in Shingal, and the continuing torment of Ezidi people in the IDP camp in Dohuk controlled by the Kurdistani authority in Iraq, the Kurdish Democratic Party, a political power that has extended its influence to other countries, not least where the Ezidi diaspora reside.

However, the sculptural assembly is hard and heavy to move for wider viewing. It stands next to a couch in a stuffed room in the basement of his house. Kheder would like to turn the concrete sculpture into a tall bronze that could withstand the elements and stand in a central place where the public can easily access it. But limited finances means that this genocide work of art has to rest in a cramped space next to his sofa in his small subterranean studio in which every nook and cranny is crammed with his paintings and other paraphernalia—trinkets, figurines, animalesque models, ticking clocks and even a Singer sewing machine. Not only is it subterranean, but it is also subaltern for visually voicing the views of those marginalised not only in the “homeland” but also in exile.

The basement rooms have become a treasure trove to trivia that Kheder has collected along the way since the genocide. The haphazard collection acts as a counterweight to the things he had to leave behind. The room and adjoining corridor are stuffed to the point of hardly any ventilation or circulation of air, conditions that have detrimentally affected some of his paintings. The ones he bought from Iraq are now beginning to show signs of mold. The coffee paintings he tries to protect with varnish, adding an eerie sheen to the brown tinges of its subject.

Kheder in his basement workshop, painting.

Next in line are works that owe directly to his chain smoking—stacks of cigarette stubs that he has separated into grey ash for future experimentation. Understandably, many Ezidi men in particular took to smoking due to the inordinate stress that they experienced both during and after the 2014 genocide. Another of his ambitions is to present a 74-metre roll of painting on the genocide. This would be a mammoth tribute to all who experienced its excesses, 74 being an allusion to the number of genocides that the Ezidi community have been subjected to over the last few centuries.

Although navigating a lifetime of political and economic limits, Kheder’s creativity knows no bounds. Yet they rest not only in the shadows of the genocide but also in the shadows of elitist art worlds that overlook talents fountaining in subaltern quarters.

Raminder Kaur and Farhad Shomo Roto, June 2026