Sadik Kwaish Alfraji was born in Baghdad in 1960. His initial training was as a painter and printmaker, obtaining first a Diploma of Plastic Art and Painting from Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts (1982) and later a
Bachelor of Arts from Baghdad's Academy of Arts (1987). He studied art not long after
Saddam Hussein came to power. Like many other artists, Alfraji realised that the
Ba'ath Party was attempting to co-opt art and culture for use as propaganda. However, artists have the ability to play around with concepts, and they began to conceal their intended message using abstraction and other techniques to construct messages of protest that the authorities could not understand. “Dictators are stupid,” he noted, “They won't necessarily read between the lines.” As a young artist in Baghdad in the 1980s, Alfraji worked as an animator for children's television. This sparked a life-long interest in animation and multi-media productions, which has since become the foundation for much of his work. At the time of the
Iran–Iraq War, Alfraji produced a series of etchings of psychiatric patients as well as an art book,
Biography of a Head (1985), the story of a head without a body. After the war, shortages of art materials and media forced many artists, including Alfraji to use "found" material such as shrapnel and bullets, which were incorporated into their artworks. Alfraji left Iraq in the 1990s for political reasons and later settled in Amersfoort, The Netherlands where he was granted Dutch citizenship. After arriving in The Netherlands, he returned to study, enrolling at the Constantijn Huygens, Kampen, Netherlands and taking out a Diploma in Graphic Design in 2000. The artist explains: He is the subject of a book, simply titled
Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, edited by Nat Muller, Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2015). ==Work ==