EXPLORING the Kurdistan Project exhibition at the Photographers Gallery, I immediately realised how very little I knew of The Gulf War. Even as an ex-student of 20th century American history, walking into the exhibit space I was utterly clueless, excluding my honestly unsatisfactory internet research. Coming to an end eight years before I was even born, although its effects can still be felt today, the impact on Kurdistan and the Kurdish mass-killings seems to be a part of history my generation knows very little about. And as a generation immersed in visual culture, American documentary-photographer Susan Meiselas’s Kurdistan Project had profound effects on my perspective of refugee trauma. Shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, Meiselas’s long-term project Kurdistan/AkaKurdistan delves into the denied history of Kurdistan.
Best known for her work Carnival Strippers and Nicaragua, Meisela’s photography puts a lens to the unseen, the unheard, and the forgotten, offering photography which is not only profoundly educational, but permeated with the suffering of an entire civilisation. Coloured with the trauma of diaspora, the result of Saddam Hussein’s genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people in 1987 -‘88, Meisela provides an insight into the often neglected history the Kurdish mass-killings. If a picture tells a story, the Kurdistan Project tells thousands of stories from thousands of Kurdish people.
Capturing the trauma and devastation of the Kurdistan, the collection offers a complex insight into the lives of Kurdish refugees following the Gulf War and throughout the ‘90s. Documenting not only the death and destruction found in Iranian refugee camps, but the lives and national identity of the Kurdish people, Meiselas returned to Kurdistan many times after her initial five-day Visa, extending her project into the copying of Western Archives and Kurdish family photographs. Formed from a variety of different sources, the Kurdistan project is layered with the shifting facets of Kurdish everyday life, and is shared through installations across the world, her website AkaKurdistan, and her book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History.
Susan Meiselas, Villagers watch exhumation at a former Iraqi military headquarters outside Sulaymaniyah, Northern Iraq, 1991
Today, Meiselas’s work with the Kurds is ongoing through her workshops talking with Kurdish people in the UK. In light of her shortlisting for the annual Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, I sat down and talked to Meiselas about her time in Kurdish refugee camps, looking back on the project, and her role as an “image-maker in time”.
Susan Meiselas, Taymour Abdullah, 15, the only survivor of village execution, shows his bullet wound, Arbil, Northern Iraq, December, 1991
Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. How are you feeling at this point?
I’m so glad to see everyone’s work. I know Laia Abril’s book, but I didn’t know Arwed Messmer’s at all, I didn’t know any of his work. For the jury, good luck because they are very intense, each in their own way, have very different vocal points. But, I think very engaging and particularly the three which relate to social issues and conflicts are very, very strong, with a use of a lot of different materials, so there’s a lot of common language we speak even though we’re different generations which is interesting.
It’s very different social issues as well.
Very different kinds. I think if you’re German then you know that German history, probably people of a certain generation in mind knows from a distance but never intimately, so you have to ask am I a viewer which is trying to make sense of how it came to be that. I’m learning about something in a very different way, and I’m sure there is people who think about that with the Kurdish people. Abortion is something certainly something that many women know, and is engaged in many political debates about, so it’s right at the hot spot you know.
I didn’t know much at all about The Gulf War or Kurdistan’s history really at all.
Because of different generations. Okay, so you weren’t born, it’s okay.
So, you were granted a five-day visa and access to the Kurdish camps.
You’ve really read up, good for you. It was really tough to get that five-day visa, it might be hard to believe, but as an American going into Iran at that time, we know didn’t have an embassy it was very difficult. I had to go to France to get the visa, I mean that wasn’t the hardest thing to do, but getting the Visa in Paris it was just interesting how you begin a journey. I certainly didn’t think that after I got my five-day visa I would go back and continue my relationship with the Kurdish for 27 years or something.
Photographs of 20-year-old Kamaran Abdullah Saber are held by his family at Saiwan Hill cemetery. He was killed in July 1991 during a student demonstration against Saddam Hussein, Kurdistan, Northern Iraq, 1991
When you went you took a lot of photographs, and you captured a lot of trauma and devastation, when you went in what was your creative intention or mindset?
My mindset was to go in and capture what was heard about but not seen – what no one had seen. That’s a beginning point, you know you hear from refugees why they’ve fled across the boarder, you read about it, but it’s totally different to see what it means to see the complete destruction. I mean I didn’t get to see all four thousand villages but it’s a lot. You could see the rubble and the rubble and the rubble, and imagine the lives that have been impacted.
Of course, today most of them escaped safely, and then the next level beyond the rubble was looking at the graves, mass graves. Many of the communities had fled and then they progressively came back, so I was there over a period I wasn’t just there those five days. Those five days were really documenting the rubble, and then I went back a few months later and started documenting the mass graves, and again six months later and I started this process of collecting, and the collecting of a community history, and that was a much longer process, it was six and a half years.
So, you were saying that you read about refugees and see pictures, I’ve never been to a refugee camp, how does the expectations you get from the media contrast to reality for you?
Well, as you ask that question I think do I go back and think about Kurdistan, you know I’m thinking a lot about refugees today in refugee camps along the border of the US. When you’ve chosen people to dislocate themselves for different reasons, the question is what are the reasons. Not just the social and the political, but what lives have they left behind. Someone could look like you, and be the daughter of someone who has fled and you may have no connection to what it took for your mother to leave.
Someone came to our workshop at the weekend, probably close to your age, in her twenties, who had never been back to the homeland of her mother, whose life was obviously shaped by her escape from the Kurdish region of the time, in Iran. To read about what happened and then to see, to witness is a totally different experience. It’s unfathomable, it’s unimaginable, you know.
So, what kind of motivated you to create the project?
I think you know since being propelled that people had to know. There is the knowing from the outside, the community of reading about refugees, but ultimately the project becomes a lot more important for the community itself. The book is in English, and is a bi-cultural object, it lives in multiple kinds of communities, it lives in the communities of people who buy a book to learn about the region, not knowing the history. It might be of interest because of how history is told, through images, which is not usually how you learn history.
But, I think ultimately it’s deepest value has been for the Kurdish community itself, to rediscover and it’s their family album. It is very different, collecting and participating and sharing that history, and the recovery of that story. You know it had the form of a book, an exhibition, a website, this is only very partial.
You went from taking pictures of the rubble and the devastation, to kind of making copies of family photographs right?
Yeah, reproducing family photographs and photographs that were in the Western archives. Taken by travellers over time, so I’m kind of seeing myself as an image-maker in time, which is a very particular idea. It’s not just about me and about what I do, it’s about others before me, and of course since then it continues. What families might have had for themselves, what studio photographers in Kurdistan might have created for families, it is a very different kind of making of a photograph.
Studio photographs can be very revealing of a national identity, of a pride which is distinct from their neighbours, so the issue of a suppressed history, a denied history, and erased history, it’s a big motivation for why I do this work.
A lot of your pictures capture the everyday life of Kurdish people. How difficult was it to capture the culture of a people so traumatised and so displaced?
I think in some ways the hardest part of that early work was being a woman with a privileged status as a Westerner, compared to a lesser status of women of the Kurdish culture had. The gender difference at that time in the early 1990s made it complicated for me to think how could I be from this privileged welcome at one level, and then separated from women in their daily lives in how that society is organised. That’s an aspect of something I wouldn’t have had anticipated. But, I don’t think the focus of that early work, was not so much the daily life but the traumatised life from what had happened just before.
Destroyed village along the Hamilton Road, Northern Iraq, 1991
I know a lot of your work looks at women, and the roles of women specifically. How does that fit into this project?
Yeah, I’m not emphasised women per se, I think it’s women in a larger cultural environment. There are hints of that, whether it’s the leadership of women, whether it’s women holding the ID photographs of men who might have been their husbands or children. How do you link to the women who have been most impacted, I think that’s very explicit, there’s a photograph of a woman looking over a grave of where 33 men have been buried, how many of there are her kin, what does it mean to be looking?
Us looking at her looking at them, what remains of them. It’s quite different, I mean in my survey show I’m working with women who are sex workers, I’m sharing images of domestic violence against women, and the refuge in the UK, so it’s a lot more how one deals with trauma. There is a linkage, but there is a difference between individual violence and state violence.
In hindsight, how do you look back on the earlier parts of the project?
I look back thinking I hope to always have that impulse, without knowing where it’s going to take me. To follow my instincts to document something that is invisible and can be visualised, that’s a kind of core value that I carry forward. I don’t know what that next project will be, I don’t need that kind of mission of this is what I’m doing in the future. It’s more in response to what I feel, and what I can discover.
I know you’re still doing work on this project, it’s still continuing on.
I do the workshop wherever the installation goes, the last was in Paris, it was in Barcelona along with my survey show, and then before that I was in Vienna, and Frankfurt, and Rome, I’d like to say it’s part of a project in a room where the diaspora of the Kurds can be felt around the world. I’m not quite around the world yet, but there is that potential to continue this kind of way of working, of when an individual offers up a fragment of a story, of memory from the region they come from.
Where people can share stories of what it’s like to be where they are, the young woman who shared a story about her detention, when she was in the UK after living her for 7 or 8 years, suddenly received a knock on her door and was put into a detention centre. Or the young woman who had spent 9-and-a-half years in a Kurdish prison, who now feels free but of course disconnected from the community and the people she was closest to. These are stories that are endless in one sense, they speak for many others, even though they are very particular. I see that continuing in any way I can do so. Doing these workshops keeps these connections alive for me.
Just a final question, can you tell us about anything you’re working on now or anything you want to do in the future?
Yeah, the process of doing a survey show means you’ve looked back on four plus decades of work, and tried to make something coherent through the threads of thinking. One of the threads is about how I’ve returned to certain places over time, so I’m probably likely to continue that in ways I don’t yet know the expression. Some early work I did in the ‘70s in the South of the US I’m thinking about, I was just on the US Mexican border, which ties into work I did in central America in the late 1970s early ‘80s, thinking about their migration back or hopes to migrate into the US. I’m not exactly sure on what will be next, but I think that’s okay. I don’t think you have to know, you just have to feel, and then you follow your lead, your own sense.
by Emma Hart
Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2019 is now on show at The Photographers’ Gallery London until 2nd June with winner announced on 16 May 2019. For more information, click here