EXETER, UK  

May 6, 2026

The Kashkul Art Archive houses collections developed alongside Kurdish visual artists over years of collaborative projects and artist residencies. Each collection marks the beginning of a long, meaningful commitment to building as complete a library of their work as possible through digitizing, translating, subtitling, and curating. To bring movement to these online libraries, we produce short and feature-length documentaries. 

Every collection grows out of a deep, personal connection with the artist and their work. We work slowly, exploring different mediums and projects in a way that reflects our creative ethos.

The Ismail Khayat Collection

Now available on the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME) at the University of Exeter. 

In 2017, Kashkul began working on this collection alongside Khayat himself. Our work with him reflects the friendship and shared effort on this archive, along with other projects that shape his legacy with us. We began with extensive interviews, which we developed into short pieces to accompany the digital artworks. As Kashkul’s artist in residence, Khayat led workshops for students that culminated in a sculpture garden. We celebrated the creation of the  archive through a retrospective exhibition and produced documentaries focusing on the distinctive elements of his world and his space.

On May 6, 2026, at the launch of the digital archive with the Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME) at the University of Exeter, Pshtiwan Babakr introduced the collection and the collaboration, and reflected on the personal history behind the archive. He read from our conversations with Khayat on the many moments and efforts that shaped his career and its rich world, from its most basic elements of stone, mud, and land, to the scraps he drew from his surroundings, and the images that appeared to him as distilled scenes of lived moments.

The Stone Man retrospective on the AUIS campus celebrated fifty years of Khayat’s artistic process. Khayat gave us freedom to shape the exhibits within the retrospective. We framed recurring images in his work so that viewers could see the way Khayat examines one idea through multiple manifestations. To guide visitors through Ismail’s various periods, we chose to display the sketches, masks, and paintings that show these progressions of style, placing them on frames and shadow boxes crafted and on tables made by hand specifically for the exhibition.

The Sculpture Garden grounds Khayat’s worldview on AUIS campus and displays the kinds of transformations Khayat inspired. The Kurdistan Botanical Foundation brought greenery to our garden with specimens from all over the Kurdish regio, making sure what grows alongside the stones is another form of art. With Khayat, every stone brought to the garden is from a significant landscape of his life, from Khanaqin, his birthplace, Pirar, the “no man’s land” where his peace project was born, Halabja, the city that inspired so much of his poignant imagery, Slemani, the city where he spent most of his life. The stones were painted with student-artists as an experiment on the impact they’d leave on their environment and to discover how to articulate their own ideas about their world.

Ismail’s Imagination documents Khayat’s reflections on everything that moved through his artistic practice. The many topics captured across hours of filmed conversations in curated frames Pshtiwan tailored, drawing from Khayat’s environment are now edited into short documentaries shaped around the different projects we developed with Khayat. These materials also came together in a longer documentary that traces the threads of his thinking.

In 2025, Sufyan Jalal, along with a group of students, renovated the garden, tracing Khayat’s original techniques but also adding to the stones the vibrant, iconic figures drawn from Ismail’s artwork. Drawn from Khayat’s world and brushed by Sufyan and his students, the stones now present a vision now so familiar to our eyes and alludes to a rich philosophy of seeing.

This collection includes the outstanding paintings we have seen in exhibitions, along with many works that do not enter gallery spaces but remain an integral part of an artist’s process: his sketches, notebooks, personal archiving efforts, and collaborations with other artists. 

"You know, a hand—you can read it. You can see someone’s hands as an outline—that you fill with imagination. What fills our hands—this is what’s important. Once, for a certain period, I painted bodies without heads. In another period, I painted only the hands. Each part of the human body is a vital source. The right eye is different from the left. All that difference is precious. You have to look from many distances, from many sites, to see properly. You have to want to see."

Hands, from The Stone Man booklet, 2018.

Explore the Collection at Digital Archive of the Middle East (DAME) website.

For feedback or inquiries, please contact the team at [email protected].