Mosul’s Fine Arts Faculty picks up pieces in destroyed city
Cleaning up burned classrooms and destroyed statues, professors and students have reopened the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Mosul and even launched an art exhibition.
"It's the Old City of Mosul, with its beauty, that taught me to draw and paint," Khleif Mahmood, a painter and professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Mosul, told Al-Monitor, as he showed his paintings of the Old City.
The city that has inspired him is now 70% destroyed by the international coalition’s airstrikes and street battles to fight the Islamic State (IS).
“I used to sit next to the Tigris River to paint some parts of the medina [Old City]. But if I go there today, I will not even recognize where I used to sit or where the buildings were. It’s all rubble, all destroyed,” he said, with pain in his voice.
Mahmood has spent years in displacement, living in Dahuk, part of the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, Turkey, Germany and Baghdad. At the end of 2016, he returned to Dahuk, an hour north of Mosul. Finally, in November 2017, he resettled in his beloved city and returned to his work.
