Tara Abdullah: The Girl from The Cigarette Factory
Written by Aliona Pazdniakova
Artistic freedom means the ability to express lived experiences without fear. It is the right to question power structures, challenge gender norms, and speak openly about women’s realities.
For me, artistic freedom also means, that when I have an idea, I am able to realize it fully – without limitations or restrictions placed on my expression. It means having the space to produce work that may critically engage with cultural, traditional, religious, or political systems.
Freedom in art includes the right to question and critisise these systems, not out of rejection, but out of a hope for reflection, dialogue, and positive change. As for an artist, this space for honest expression is essential for me.
— Tara Abdullah
Tara Abdullah (b. 1996) is a Kurdish multidisciplinary artist from Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Her practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, sound, and installation, often taking the form of site-specific and large-scale works.
Through her art, Tara explores the most vulnerable, suppressed, violated, and silenced aspects of her home region – women, nature, and artistic freedom. In searching for her own identity and voice – both denied and repressed until her encounter with art – she raises universal questions about power, belonging, and the relationship between the individual and society.
The First Supper – Art as the way out
Growing up in a conservative patriarchal environment profoundly shaped Tara’s artistic voice, as well as the motivations and recurring motifs in her work.
“Stop making the paper dirty!” her teachers repeatedly shouted whenever Tara was drawing at school.
“Don’t make the street dirty!” her parents would say when she drew on the ground as a child.
“You are dirty like a whore now,” Tara´s mother told her when she got her first period.
For Tara, the only way out of this darkness was through art. It was a painful path, she explained, but the only one that offered the possibility of liberation.
In her family, art was considered sinful and harmful to the mind. The only artistic input Tara was allowed was Disney cartoons on television. They inspired her by presenting an alternative world, and she became fascinated by their heroes and princesses. Together with other thoughts she used to write down her dreams and fantasies in a diary.
One day, when Tara was twelve, her father found the diary. He gathered the entire family in a room and read it aloud. As punishment, he beat Tara and shaved her head.
– My mother was holding my head, and my sisters were holding my legs, Tara recalls.
As a result of the assault, Tara was hospitalized. Her father told hospital staff that she had been attacked by a cat. After this traumatic experience, Tara noticed that much of her hair had turned white. Her sisters mocked her for it.
– In my family, I became the black sheep, a bad omen, blamed for all misfortunes, Tara explains.
Tara felt betrayed by her notebook and by writing itself, which had exposed her innermost thoughts. As a result, she began writing in mirror script so that no one could understand her words. The origins of her distinctive visual language in painting may lie in this experience as well.
Alongside Disney cartoons, religious stories were one of the few narratives available to Tara during her childhood. She was particularly drawn to stories about Jesus, a figure who also holds an important place in Islam. At the age of thirteen, however, Tara lost her faith in God after being harassed by a mullah. Yet her fascination with the figure of Jesus remained. Identifying with him, she began reimagining religious narratives through her own experiences.
When Tara first discovered art books, she hid them secretly under her bed. They were soon found and destroyed by her father. Despite these restrictions, she managed to deceive her parents and gain admission to an art college. Because her religious father considered drawing human faces a sin, he only allowed her to attend on the condition that she wear a niqab and remain fully covered. During her studies, this made her the target of bullying from both teachers and fellow students.
The first time Tara traveled abroad and visited museums, meeting in person the artworks she had previously only seen in books, the experience had a strong impact on her. Years later, she reflected on this moment in her painting The First Supper. Interweaving personal memory, imagination, emotion, and religious symbolism, the work transforms the biblical narrative into a metaphor for her first encounter with art – a moment of nourishment, revelation, and awakening.
– First is a start, a beginning, and something so huge that it never ends, Tara states.
With the help of friends, mentors, and other supporters who believed in her artistic vision, Tara eventually obtained a studio in a former cigarette factory in her hometown, where she was able to fully devote herself to her artistic practice. This space marked a symbolic turning point in her life – her first independent artistic studio, a place of transformation, and a counterpoint to the restrictions of her childhood. For Tara, it became her first experience of artistic and personal freedom, and a point of no return to her former life.
– Tara is art, and art is Tara, she says to herself and to the world.
Reclaiming the voice – Amplifying the silenced
Tara’s work frequently addresses issues affecting women, including bodily autonomy, gender expectations, and the pressures imposed by social and religious structures. Through painting and large-scale public installations, she challenges restrictive narratives surrounding gender, identity, and personal freedom.
Tara’s art bridges the personal and the political by engaging with materials and symbols rooted in her local context. Whether working with repurposed clothing from women affected by violence or salvaged metal sheets from war-torn regions, she transforms everyday artifacts into powerful carriers of memory and testimony. Through these materials, Tara gives voice to marginalized experiences and creates poetic interventions in public space.
Projects such as Feminine (2020), a five-kilometer fabric installation representing the collective suffering of women, and Voice (2022), a city-wide sonic intervention, demonstrate her ongoing interest in memory, public confrontation, and healing through shared experience and cultural resonance.
These public works have provoked strong reactions in Tara’s home region.
– As a result, I have faced indirect blacklisting and professional restrictions. The Voice project was even taken to court on unfounded accusations, contributing to my eventual decision to leave Iraq, Tara explains.
Despite these pressures, she continues to work critically and openly, using art as a space for dialogue, visibility, and resistance.
Tara often works on a large scale and in site-specific contexts, beyond the confines of the white cube. She tells that this approach originated during her years in Iraq, where she sought to reach ordinary people outside the art world, a sphere in which she received little recognition or support.
– By bringing my work into public space, I want to dissolve the barriers between artists and audiences. I want to show that it is possible to find a way to speak out, Tara states.
At the core of many of Tara’s projects is the conviction that women’s private experiences of pain, shame, and oppression should not remain hidden. She argues that shame functions as a powerful mechanism of social control and that art has the capacity to expose and dismantle it.
The concept behind Feminine emerged from the shame imposed on women’s bodies and even their clothing. Drawing on the common practice of hiding women’s garments beneath men’s clothes on household washing lines, Tara transformed this invisible gesture into a monumental public statement.
– I wanted to expose that hidden feeling of shame publicly, she explains.
For Voice, Tara employed 66 loudspeakers and megaphones – media traditionally associated with mosques and religious preaching in her society. The act of a woman speaking publicly through such a medium was widely perceived as provocative and transgressive.
The recording concludes with the words: “This is the complaint message of Tara Abdullah.”
For Tara, publicly naming herself was an act of defiance and solidarity. By exposing her identity, she demonstrated that she was not afraid, encouraging other women to speak out and make their voices heard.
Speaking across the borders
While Tara’s public interventions have often been controversial in her home country, they have also gained significant international recognition and acclaim.
In 2024, Tara was nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize. For her project In Between, presented in Kyiv, Ukraine she received a Special Prize. The installation sought to connect collective trauma across borders by linking two major conflicts: the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Iran–Iraq War.
In works such as Qazwan Rosary and her ongoing painting series Beyond Gender Mold, Tara extends these investigations by reflecting on the psychological and social construction of gender identity.
In Qazwan Rosary, she engages with the concept of haram (forbidden) within traditional and religious communities, combining it with the symbolism of the rosary as a representation of male domination and control in the Middle Eastern context. By reclaiming the rosary, the installation critiques gendered power structures and challenges societal taboos. It foregrounds themes of shame, vulnerability, and the policing of women’s bodies within patriarchal societies.
In the painting series Beyond Gender Mold, Tara employs symbolic imagery and layered narratives to question inherited norms and explore the fluidity of selfhood beyond prescribed social roles. Through recurring motifs, fragmented figures, and visual metaphors, she examines gender as a cultural construct transmitted through family structures and reinforced by social, religious, and cultural frameworks.
In many works, figures are arranged according to hierarchical scales – the father depicted as larger, the mother smaller, and the children smallest – reflecting the unconscious assignment of authority, role, and value within patriarchal systems. These disproportionate representations reveal how identity is shaped by predetermined expectations, often at the expense of individuality and personal agency.
By disrupting conventional representations of femininity, masculinity, and familial hierarchy, Tara exposes the invisible structures that regulate self-perception and social belonging. Her works directly challenge fixed notions of identity and open up space for resistance, transformation, and self-definition beyond restrictive gender binaries.
Since arriving in Oslo in February 2026, Tara has become actively involved in a number of artistic projects and collaborations. Her performance, I Want to Speak, resonated strongly with Norwegian audiences through its clear and powerful message: a woman claiming the space and time, using her most accessible instrument – her own voice – to assert that every woman deserves to be heard and has the power to make herself heard.
In March, the performance served as an artistic intervention during the panel discussion on art as resistance and defence at Riksscenen, where Tara also participated as a speaker. In April, I Want to Speak opened the conference Voices in Public Art, organized by Mesén in collaboration with The Finnish-Norwegian Cultural Institute, followed by a screening of the film from the Voice project.
Later in April Tara has opened her own atelier to the public during Oslo Open 2026, presenting a series of new paintings created during her residency alongside a large-scale work in progress. The installation will be shown at the Lyse Netter Art Festival in Moss in June, after which she will continue developing a new installation for Hvitsten Salong in Hvitsten, where it will be presented in August.
The new work in progress she is currently working on is constructed from hundreds of meters of braided black plastic bags – a material that simultaneously evokes fragility, resilience, and survival. The installation draws on a painful contemporary event.
– During attacks carried out by radical Islamist groups against Kurdish communities in Syria, the cutting of a Kurdish woman fighter’s hair became a symbolic act of domination, humiliation, and control, Tara clarifies.
By reconstructing braids from discarded plastic, she reclaims this violent gesture and transforms it into a symbol of resistance and endurance. What was intended as an act of erasure becomes, in her work, a monument to persistence, dignity, and collective memory.
Tara often says that the possibility of realizing a new project is what makes her truly happy. In Iraq, artistic initiatives are frequently hindered by political, social, and institutional obstacles. Even when opportunities arise, they are often uncertain and delayed. The ability to develop and produce work freely is therefore something she does not take for granted.
– I feel most at peace when I am working. Artistic creation provides a sense of purpose and direction. When the work stops, I am immediately confronted by dark memories, traumatic experiences, and anxieties about the future, Tara explains.
Art has become not only her profession, but also a way of processing the realities she has lived through.
The residency in Norway offers me a rare and valuable safe space. It allows me to deepen my artistic research, explore Nordic and European art contexts, and expand my professional network.
Most importantly, it gives me the freedom to develop and produce new projects that I may not be able to realize in my home region. I hope to create new works, experiment with scale and materials, and engage in meaningful dialogue with local institutions and audiences.
– Tara Abdullah
Through painting, performance, installation, and public interventions, Tara Abdullah gives visibility to silenced experiences. Transforming personal memories into collective encounters, her work explores themes of shame, displacement, resistance, and liberation.
erformance, installation, and public interventions, Tara Abdullah gives visibility to silenced experiences. Transforming personal memories into collective encounters, her work explores themes of shame, displacement, resistance, and liberation.
erformance, installation, and public interventions, Tara Abdullah gives visibility to silenced experiences. Transforming personal memories into collective encounters, her work explores themes of shame, displacement, resistance, and liberation....
