HOST: Greetings, peaceful viewers. Welcome to Enlightenment Entertainment.
The great rivers Tigris and Euphrates are known for having brought about the enchanting Mesopotamia,the Cradle of Civilization. At the place where the two rivers meet stands the native town of the Iraq-born artist Farouk Kaspaules. Mr. Farouk Kaspaules had come to North America thirty some years ago.
However, in his heart, he has never left his beautiful birthplace and beloved cultural homeland. Starting from the mid-1980s, Mr. Kaspaules began to contemplate and express love for his homeland afar, in the language of art.
Farouk Kaspaules (m):I have these from memories,running in the neighborhoods of Baghdad, where you go to school, you come from school, you go to the park, you play soccer, and there’s the smell of the food, the sound of people, the landscape, and the rich history. We were in secondary school and then we would take trips. They say, yeah, this is a 3,000-years-old monument.
Farouk (m): You go to city of Babel, to go to city of Ninawa, you go to the Tigris and Euphrates when they meet in the South. So, I mean these are something that has imbedded in my own personality, simple really.
All my fond memory of the place is very beautiful and suddenly… but at a distance, and this is one of the issues I try to work it in my art practice.
HOST: Indeed, history of civilizations manifests in Mr. Kapaules’ personal life.As an Iraqi-born Canadian, Mr. Kapaules is one of the descendents of Chaldeans, people of an ancient kingdom in part of Babylonia.
His native language is Akkadian, a language of ancient Mesopotamia. Pining for his homeland ancient and modern, Mr. Kapaules set aside his career as an economist and turned to art to seek the means of recollection.