Who were they?

2016,
digital print, ink and fingerprint,
90x135 cm

‘Who were they?’ is a photograph of the children of Sur, who lost their family and friends and were forced to move from their homes because of the curfew that was announced in Amed (Diyarbakir), Sur county in December of 2015. By obscuring the children's faces with fingerprints, my intervention meant to turn them into geographical subjects rather than being a symbol of disidentification. Even though the text on the wall ‘Yurtsever Devrimci Gençlik Hareketi’ (The Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement) was written by the youth of my generation who chose to fight, the children chose to pose in front of the text which became a symbol concerning their future. To have lived through the same losses as the children, as a Kurdish artist who was forced to migrate, the work ‘Who were they?’ is the untaken childhood photograph of my generation; the current and future photograph of an endless war, pain and anger.