The title Hanging Issues is a play on words. It refers to: (1) the physical installation of the works, which comprises of 60 photographic panels hung onto six parallel clothes lines; (2) unsolved political issues that are still in a state of lingering (i.e. Hanging Parliament); (3) the action of punishing someone to death through the action of hanging; (4) “hang somebody out to dry”, to leave somebody to struggle through a bad situation without support.

This series Hanging Issues was developed during the time I spent in Thailand in 2012, when I undertook an art residency in Ne Na Contemporary Art Space / Baan Monfai Culture Centre in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Hanging Issues consists of 60 panels of documentary photographs embedded in handmade Thai Paper (Kada Saa). Each panel contains a segment of a printed documentary photograph of political events related to the recent political history of Kurdistan. I embedded these within the Kada Saa paper in an attempt to evoke a sense of the many layers of issues. The work was created in response to social and political unrest in the recent history of Kurdistan. It examined how contemporary political events manifest in societies, which are facing turbulence in all aspects of life. The work explored how this unrest directly or indirectly reflects and impacts the individual within that society.