Kurdistan

Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1991–2007) is a multimedia project comprising photographs, videos, documents and oral accounts collected by the artist. This archive of collective memory reveals the history of a people dispersed throughout the world. Meiselas originally arrived in northern Iraq to document Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign of genocide against the Kurds launched in 1988. She felt that contemporary photographs could bear witness to a crime by imaging the exhumation of a mass grave of individual remains. The victims, however, were Kurdish citizens from civil society who could only be portrayed through the past century of images that revealed their aspirations for a Kurdish homeland.

Meiselas explains her interest in the images and documents that she compiled to make this work: “I became preoccupied by the idea that ‘pictures are made and taken away’, so a culture might not get to see itself. There is also the issue of what happens after an image is made. I began to backtrack to Western archives and family collections to discover where a photograph of a Kurd might be – out in the world, lost, buried in a depository. Then I felt an additional sense of responsibility to repatriate what I had found. The burial released the metaphor for uncovering Kurdistan, which lives in the act of digging. The digging unleashed an obsessive gene that drove me to search for what had gone missing, and what remained unknown. The trawling through the archives was parallel with the witnessing and the actual exhumation of graves.”

The installation includes a “Storymap”, to which the accounts from a diaspora Kurdish community are regularly added (through participatory workshops), making each exhibition site-specific.