Scholar and architect Pedram Baldari looks at art and cultural production through a stateless and Indigenous lens. The University of Michigan assistant professor also researches how displacement and the diasporic experience impact how artists imagine themselves.
For Baldari, this isn’t simply a theoretical or intellectual pursuit. He has lived experience as a displaced Kurdish interdisciplinary artist. A year before he was born, the Islamic Republic of Iran attacked his hometown of Sine (also known as Sanandaj) in northeastern Kurdistan. It’s within the current border of Iran.
“Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the Kurds,” Baldari tells the Toronto Spark over Zoom. “It’s in basically all the archives you look at. They equated us with vilest infidels that walked on this Earth. And they committed genocide and ethnic cleansing in Kurdistan and no one talks about it.”
According to Baldari, his city was under siege for 30 days in 1980 as Iran dropped 14,000 bombs.
“People were starved,” he says. “They destroyed all the hospitals.”
This military blitz was an early catalyst for a unique musical art project called Resonant Transmutations, which will be performed at Music on Main’s 2025 Modulus Festival in Vancouver. It originated when Baldari decided to create seven musical instruments from gun barrels and other decommissioned weapons obtained from police in Minnesota. In effect, he transformed deadly firepower into entities for healing.
This embodies Baldari’s artistic vision of re-imagining a future in which displaced artists can picture themselves in a situation where victimhood ends. He maintains that this opens up possibilities for achieving liberation from intergenerational trauma.
“I think art is a good carrier for that,” Baldari says.
Baldari refuses to change shape of weapons
He worked with University of Minnesota faculty member and Hindustani vocalist Matthew Rahaim, who composed music that can be performed on these instruments.
Baldari says that Rahaim will be the vocalist and he will play an instrument/sound sculpture Jîwan, which was made from a decommissioned weapon. According to Baldari, Jîwan (pronounced Jeewan) is a Kurdish name derived from Jîn (life). He likens this piece to a hammered dulcimer.
In addition, Cherolyn Kay Fischer, Dameun Strange, and Nathan Hanson will each play woodwind instruments made from decommissioned rifles.
“I started learning about the acoustics of wind instruments,” Baldari says. “I cannot tell you how difficult this was because gun barrels taper down. They’re thick or heavy and they don’t want to do anything else besides what they are.”
Matthew Rahaim composed “Surkh Hai Aahan” based on the instrument/sound sculpture Jîwan.
Moreover, Baldari refused to completely change these weapons. He wants them to appear exactly as they are when people hear them making music. So, he had to learn how to speak through the material in ways that lessoned its resistance to new uses.
“In a lot of Indigenous nations, the first time they saw a gun, they thought this was a fire-breathing entity,” Baldari says. “I want to place breath into these barrels.”
The other performers will be Aida Shahghasemi (kimanche, vocals, daff) and Ahmad Yousefbeigi (percussion, chimes). Michael Duffy is overseeing sound design.
Resonant Transmutations resulted from a collaboration between two Minneapolis-based non-profit organizations: Pillsbury United Communities, which ran a gun buyback program, and Art is My Weapon.
“I used to live in Minneapolis, Minnesota for six to seven years,” Baldari says. “Actually, that’s the first place in the United States I started calling home just because of the way I felt…in that place.”
Countering benevolent racism
When Baldari was born in 1981, several of his family members were languishing in prison in Sine, which is within the border of Iran. He says that Iranian authorities built the jail in the downtown core of the city so that Kurdish residents could see what happens to those who rebelled against the regime.
“They were being tortured day in and day out,” Baldari declares.
As a toddler, he accompanied his mother on walks by the prison. They would shout their love for their relatives across the wall. Ten years later, Baldari reports, those family members told him that every day they were in prison, they waited for him and his mother to call their names.
There are approximately 45 to 60 million Kurds, according to Baldari, largely concentrated in a region that crosses over national boundaries of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Türkiye. This makes Kurds one of the world’s largest stateless ethic groups. And this statelessness came about, in part, because of the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between English and French diplomats, with the support of Russia and Italy. This set the stage for the partition of the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence after the First World War.
Baldari has much to say about the international community’s silence over the erasure of Kurdish self-determination.
“It’s been 100 years of that,” the artist insists. “I try to always, at least in my conversations with people, talk about this idea of pushing back against benevolent racism.”
He says that Western liberals sometimes suggest that only Western powers created colonial superstructures. Baldari believes that this takes responsibility and agency away from other powerful states that practise colonialism, including Türkiye, Iran previously, Iraq, Syria, and even India and China.
To cite one example, Baldari points out that it was a crime to converse in Kurdish in Türkiye. He also accuses Türkiye of creating concentration camps and taking children away from their Kurdish parents. Baldari draws parallels between this repression and what happened to Indigenous people in North America.
Colonizers try to crush Kurds
For a brief period following the Second World War, the Kurds had an autonomous state led by Qazi Muhammad. He supported mandatory education for women and the freedom to speak one’s mother tongue.
“He was oppressed and executed by the Iranian state, working with the British,” Baldari says.
Many in the foreign-policy establishment have rallied for self-determination over the years for the Baltic states, Taiwan, Kosovo, South Sudan, Eritrea, and Timor-Leste. The Toronto Spark asks Baldari why we don’t see the same energy expended on behalf of Kurds, who have a much larger population than any of those countries.
“It has to do with dealings of the superpowers at the time with the nation states currently in the Middle East,” he replies. “Historically speaking, all of these states have committed multiple genocides and ethnic cleansing. They won’t stop.”
Following the U.S.-led attack on Iraq and the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein in 2003, he says that the Americans wanted to keep Iraq intact because this served its purposes. This came after the Iraqi dictator had already murdered up to 200,000 Kurds, according to Baldari. Hussein’s campaign of genocide included deploying chemical weapons against civilian populations.
Baldari emphasizes that in recent years, NATO has used Türkiye as a “surrogate state” to counter Russia.
“They didn’t even want to create an autonomous [Kurdish] region on the books,” Baldari says. “They knew Türkiye won’t let it, and America did not want to upset Türkiye.”
Next door in Syria, he notes that the West was quick to recognize the new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, even though he’s a former Syrian leader of the terrorist group al Qaeda. This group of Islamists was allied with the ultra-extremist ISIS when ISIS was fighting intense battles against Kurdish forces in the Rojava region in Western Kurdistan.
“A lot of information out there suggests that the Turkish state supported the ISIS combatants through logistics,” Baldari says. “They committed the Yazidi genocide.”
Baldari taken back to his childhood
It irks him that some in the West bring up the statelessness of the Kurds to justify denying self-determination to Palestinians.
“Why do we have to be dragged into this conversation?” Baldari asks. “These are two completely different historical injuries.”
It also bothers him that Iranian expat opponents of the theocratic regime don’t speak up on behalf of Kurdish autonomy. This is despite a Kurdish dynasty ruling major parts of Eastern Kurdistan non-stop for 800 years.
“When it comes to Kurdish rights, they all become far-right nationalists, believing in this historical fantasy of the Iranian empire,” Baldari says. “We have been in a nation for a million years.”
He adds that while colonialism has been industrialized and modernized in the West, it existed long before that in Asia under Alexander the Great, the Persians, and Genghis Khan.
Converting the decommissioned weapons from Minneapolis into instruments actually took Baldari back to his childhood when he would wander around his hometown of Sine. In those days, he and his friends would find wartime remnants and repurpose them into useful products.
“I learned how to make, for example, pen holders,” Baldari recalls. “We would put them together and create little flower pods. We would find these items and we would literally re-imagine their afterlife. There was a process of metamorphosis taking place all the time by creating life out of death.”
He acknowledges that in some respects, this process of renewal is a metaphor for the Kurdish people. They too are trying to re-imagine their future by creating life out of death.
Music on Main’s Modulus Festival will present Resonant Transmutations at the Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Centre in Vancouver at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday (November 8). Doors open at 7 p.m. For tickets and more information, visit the Music on Main website. Learn more about the communities that make up Canada on the Toronto Spark website. The Toronto Spark is on Bluesky @torontospark.bsky.social.
