FACETS OF EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE YAZIDIS – OUR FIRST EXHIBITION AS PART OF THE YAZIDI COMMUNITY ARCHIVE

Our first exhibition was a great success! In late 2024, we had the honor of hosting the first exhibition as part of the Yazidi Community Archive project at the Lalish Cultural Center in Sharya in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The special aspect of the exhibition: alongside professional photographs, it included material taken by our project participants from the IDP camps Sharya and Qadia themselves.

The Yazidi Community Archive by HÁWAR.help documents and preserves Yazidi history and memories by telling the stories of the Yazidi people through their own personal material. Our goal is to centralize unique material, preserve it, and make the stories of the Yazidi people accessible to future generations. The Yazidi community is involved in the project through participatory approaches such as photography and photo editing workshops offered by HÁWAR.help. The Yazidi community thus plays the leading role in telling their own story. 

As part of the project, we conducted six photography workshops for a total of 63 participants at our centers in the IDP camps Sharya and Qadia in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The two-day workshops taught our project participants the basics of photography and storytelling. They learned how to use photography to document their culture and identity as seen through their own eyes, and make it accessible to the outside world. Some of the resulting photographs became a central part of the exhibition at the Lalish Cultural Center.

The exhibition presented the photographs of our talented project participants to the public and gave the Yazidi community the opportunity to be part of a cultural production that was not only made about them, but also co-created with them. The material shows different facets of their everyday lives, highlights constants and changes and opens up the space for conversations about what is no longer, what must not be lost and what is yet to come. The Yazidi visitors who visited the exhibition throughout the day emphasized how important this project is for them, as it tells stories from before the genocide while protecting this material from being lost and preserving it for posterity.

As an organization founded on the ashes of the Yazidi genocide, we are very grateful that the Yazidi community has shared so many touching stories with us – and therefore with you. This exhibition was just the first of many to come, we look forward to sharing the stories from the Yazidi Community Archive with you!

We would like to thank the Federal Foreign Office for supporting the Yazidi Community Archive. The project was implemented in cooperation with elbarlament.