ABSTRACT EXPRESSION: Creating is a Form of Rebellion – Ilos Ilyas Elias Kirkan

Art often begins where familiar structures end – challenging boundaries without permission. For me, creating is a way to disrupt and move beyond linguistic, cultural, and traditional patterns, pushing ideas beyond limits and imagined borders on both an individual and collective level.

I create to loosen fixed meanings, personal limits, and inherited boundaries. By crossing lines, I challenge what is taken for granted, what is assumed, and invite new dialogue, understanding, and transformation. My work unravels what feels permanent, making room for fresh meaning to emerge. For me, creating is a form of rebellion – refusing to accept the world as it is.

My work is shaped by layers of memory and history, where patterns fade, fracture, and reappear over time. Each surface carries traces of what came before – old meanings, old stories, old wounds – only to be overwritten, rewritten or transformed by what follows. These layers are never neat; they overlap, shift, and remain in motion.

This is reflected in my material process …

Through layers upon layers of textured collages, white gauze headscarves, knitted lace decorations and cloths, lace net curtains, sand, gravel, leaves, glue, and paint I build surfaces that become physical records of memory. White is the symbol of peace. White are the headscarves of the Kurdish Saturday Mothers, also known as the Peace Mothers – beaded with colours like blossoming flowers, each colour a hope, each hope a refusal to disappear. The textures accumulate like histories – dense, uneven, and sometimes unstable – revealing the tension between preservation and erosion. The materials carry the weight of time while resisting permanence, suggesting that memory is always changing, never fixed.

Creation is not just expression; it is movement – movement of ideas, identities, and perception. It crosses borders that politics, language, and habit reinforce, resisting systems that seek to contain identity and thought.

That is why going beyond one’s limits is essential. By pushing past comfort and inheritance, the work becomes a site of discovery. Art speaks across differences not by offering answers, but by inviting others into shared questioning.

Ultimately, it is about creating new traditions by daring to break old ones.

“For me, creating is a form of rebellion – refusing to accept the world as it is.”

– Conceptual Danish-Kurdish Artist KIRKAN, Ilos Ilyas Elias