IN THE middle of the floor in the gallery hosting this year’s Crawford MA Art and Process exhibition in Cork lies a strange heap; a jumble-sale mish-mash of personal effects. Clothes, underwear and shoes are mounded a metre high. They are a uniform ochre colour and have a sandy texture.

To those who don’t know what they represent, this piece and the other two mixed media sculptures exhibited here by Ali Raza, must certainly be unsettling, but to those who are aware of the artist’s background, this mound assumes nightmarish dimensions. An Iraqi Kurd, Raza’s latest collection explores the concept of genocide, a theme he has far too close a personal experience of.

During the al Anfal campaign of 1987-1988, Saddam Hussein’s army killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqi Kurdish civilians (Kurdish sources say as many as 182,000) and destroyed 4,000 villages. Men and women were segregated, and males deemed to be of fighting age were often executed. Raza was eight at the time. He remembers his childhood as “frightening; the bombings, hiding in basements, running away. It was just a disaster, a nightmare”.

Many Kurdish people were moved from the mountainous regions of northern Iraq to concentration camps in the south, and Raza describes how Kurdish civilians were buried alive in the desert by the Iraqi forces. Now living in Cork and completing his MA at the CIT Crawford College of Art and Design, his collection’s title, ‘The Story of Sand’, reflects the desire evident in his work to uncover these stories and to bring to light the dark secrets buried by Saddam’s Ba’ath regime.

In 1991, during an attempted Kurdish uprising in Raza’s home town of Tuz Khurmatu, Ali, his parents and his 10 siblings fled their home on foot, crossing 27 mountains to reach temporary safety in Iran. After returning to Kurdistan, Raza signed up to fight in the civil war at the tender age of 15, and fought for 10 months. As an adult, he moved to Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish-controlled region, and attended art college. His experiences of war still haunt him and find their way to the surface in his art.

“When I became a soldier and I went to fight, you see those things, dead bodies around you,” Raza says. “I was always upset with the way humans treat each other in a savage way. To me, art became a huge healing process, it became part of my life. All those things in me are still going on, when you are a child and you grow up in an environment of constant war it continues to affect you.”

Raza’s home town is just 50 miles away from Kirkuk, and very close to areas that are seeing heavy bombardment in the current impasse between ISIS and the Kurdish Peshmerga. “Part of me is very worried about what’s going on,” Raza says. “I think all Kurdish individuals are worried and we’re dreaming that Kurdistan will be recognised as a country.”

Raza’s matter-of-fact tone belies the weight of the experience of Kurdish people, not only in Iraq but also Iran, Turkey and Syria: “When you are in certain environments full of violence, you are just fighting, there is suffering, you are not allowed to speak Kurdish, you are not allowed to have the basics for daily life, how can you be educated? You become a different type of creature, savage, an unhealthy being.”

Ali sees art, education and creativity as vital to forging a stable future for Kurdistan, and envisages an upsurge in Kurdish culture, including art, cinema, music and literature, when peace finally comes. “I’ve learned so much and I hope in the future to share that knowledge with Kurdish students in art college in Kurdistan, and to be part of that peaceful revolution.”

The MA in Art & Process exhibition, 17 Heads 14 Handles, takes place at the CCAD Sullivan’s Quay campus (former tax office) until Friday.