ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A Kurdish artist has drawn the attention of Germans with his sculptures that preserve and document Kurdish culture. Salih Namir is from Derik in northeast Syria (Rojava). He graduated from a fine arts institute in Damascus in 1995. He started sculpting in his first and second years of study. Namir migrated to Germany in 2014 and continued improving his sculpting skills there. “It is important to know how to deal with a stone and pretend to speak with it. You have to transform it to your desired form,” he told Rudaw. Florian Tooli is a German sculptor. “One day I came to my workplace. Two Syrian men were standing there. One of them said that he was looking for a job and I told him that I did not have any vacancies. Then a woman called me and said that he was actually not looking for a job but a place to start his business. This is how I met my friend Salih Namir,” he said. Tooli said Namir calls him his master, “but I tell him he is my professor.” Namir has been working as a sculptor since 2016 in Germany where he is gaining a following of admirers of his art. He said he wants to revive the culture of his Rojava hometown through sculpting. “It is important for people and the government to know that culture is like a huge castle in which we can defend ourselves from extinction,” Namir said.
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