Runak Resulpur's Exhibition

We have pleasure to invite you to the exhibition entitled Jin Jiyan Azadî (Women, Life, Freedom) of the works by Rounak Rasoulpour, the Kurdish artist from Rojhelat (Iranian Kurdistan), currently based in Sweden. The outdoor exhibition will be opened at 3 PM on February the 7th in Łazienki Królewskie (Royal Park) in Warsaw and will take place untill the end of February. It is part of the festival Kurdish Sun in Winter Warsaw organised by the the Andrzej Wajda Centre For Film Culture and ALCITfem team.

Rounak Rasoulpour & Jin Jiyan Azadî (Women, Life, Freedom)

I am Rounak Rasoulpour, a Kurdish artist, illustrator, animator and graphic designer. I have been actively working in these fields for twenty years and my works have been published and exhibited in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Turkey, Sweden, Poland and many other countries.

I was born in 1978 in Mahabad in Iranian Kurdistan (East Kurdistan or Rojhelat in Kurdish). I completed primary education in Bokan and attended the art school in Mahabad. Later I continued to study graphic design at Urmia University. After graduating from the university, I started working as a photography teacher at a Children’s Center but I was fired because of teaching in Kurdish which is my mother tongue. Also, I did not pass the Iranian Islamic Republic’s political and ideological exams. However, I decided to continue with my education and in 2004 I went to Iraqi Kurdistan (South Kurdistan or Başûr) and took up the ceramic studies at the Suleimani University of Fine Arts. While in Başûr I have designed and published the covers for hundreds of books, magazines, music albums as well as posters and logos. Some of them were the joint projects with another artist, privately my husband, Seywan Saeedyan.

Because of the hardships in Iraqi Kurdistan, in 2014 me and my family decided to move to Amed (Diyarbakir) in Bakur (North Kurdistan/ Türkiye). In Bakur I was involved in illustration projects for children’s books and soon completed illustrations for 21 books in Kurmanji and in Zazaki dialects of Kurdish language. Also, I took up working in animation projects for Zarok TV (the first and only channel for Kurdish kids). It included music videos in which I was an illustrator and character designer. In total I contributed to 12 animation works. I was very happy working on children’s art, because in our country little attention is paid to children and youth education and even Kurdish children living in Europe have difficult access to education in their mother tongue.

There is also a lot to tell about being a Kurdish woman artist and the many obstacles we face as women but I have never worried about it. On the contrary, Kurdish women became frequent motives in my works because they often offered me strength and inspiration. This exhibition presents many women heroes. They are either rooted in our recent tragic history or in our culture. I currently live in Stockholm and continue working as a graphic designer for the Apec Publishing House. In 2020 I designed my first book cover for the book in Polish – Gorączka (Fever), short stories by Kurdish writer Mehmet Dicle translated by Joanna Bocheńska and published by Dialog Academic Publisher.

To access my works see the link.