Haider Jabbar (b. 1986) started his career in film, working as an art director on short and feature films. He received his art education at the Baghdad Institute and College of Fine Arts from 2003 to 2014. He now lives and works in Belgium. Before this life, he knew war, hunger, and an economic siege that killed 500,000 Iraqi children.
In the 1990’s, he got to know the names of the rockets in the war. He still remembers the sounds of the planes and the guns. During the US occupation of Iraq in 2003, he saw his first dead body in the streets, an Iraqi soldier. Then, the Abu Gharib prisoner torture and buse in 2004. The Secretarian War of 2007 would follow. Fear and confusion filled the streets, and everyone, including his father, carried arms. In 2007, the language of Iraq was murder and it was normal to state at death in the face on any day. This was the result of Secretarian and religious racism. Their daily events consisted of him and his friends looking among the debris and gathering the bodies of those they once knew. Here they could take pictures on their smartphones. A life of tampering, cruelty, and rebellion. This is one kind of fantasy. Today, he is looking to end the cruelty and the violence within us. We are born to live, not to die.