Rushdi Anwar draws from his personal experience as a Kurdish refugee and survivor of state violence to contemplate issues of displacement and trauma endured as a result of colonial and ideological regimes. His practice encompasses installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and video, recalling the everyday struggles of the hundreds of thousands in his homeland and within the diaspora who currently face displacement, dispossession, discrimination, and persecution. Through his work, Anwar questions the possibility of redemption and the collective necessity to address the urgent issue of statelessness. At the 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennial, Anwar presented several bodies of work, collectively titled A Hope and Peace to End All Hope and Peace (2023–ongoing), which investigate the enduring influence of the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), a French-British- led foreign strategy on the promise of the downfall of the Ottoman Empire dividing the West Asian region into European-dominated colonies. Combining sculpture, audio, archival photographs, maps and documents, the works lay bare the farce of history, connecting the past to present conditions of geopolitics in the aforementioned region.