Susan Meiselas

Photographer
   
Mediations Kurdistan
Location: New York City, New York
Nationality: American
Biography: Susan Meiselas, born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1948, received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New... MORE
Private Story
Mediations Kurdistan
Copyright Susan Meiselas 2024
Updated Sep 2021
Location Array
Topics Photography
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.
LinkedIn Icon Facebook Icon Twitter Icon
3,071

Also by Susan Meiselas —

Story [Unlisted]

West Virginia

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

PSG Contact Sheets

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

MAM test

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

MAM Exhibition

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

360 Virtual Exhibition

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

360 Virtual Videos

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Day of Outrage (1987- 1988)

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Carnival Strippers Making Of

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Artifacts

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Porto Exhibition

Susan Meiselas / Array
Story [Unlisted]

Mediations Domestic Violence

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Mediations Pandora

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Mediations Central America

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Early Years

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Eyes Open Book

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Eyes Open

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Porto

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Through a Woman's Lens

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Preparation and Installation

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Crossings

Susan Meiselas / Array
Story [Unlisted]

20 Dirhams or 1 photo?

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Mediations Carnival

Susan Meiselas
Story [Unlisted]

Kurdistan Exhibit

Susan Meiselas / Array
Story [Unlisted]

Kurdistan

Susan Meiselas
Mediations Kurdistan by Susan Meiselas
Sign-up for
For more access