The famous Carmignac photojournalism prize rewards two women for their reporting on the condition of women in Afghanistan, all during a Parisian event..
For six months, Canadian-Iranian photojournalist Kiana Hayeri and French researcher Mélissa Cornet traveled across the seven provinces of Afghanistan to investigate the living conditions of young girls and their elders under the Taliban regime. Reduced to silence since the promulgation of a law last August prohibiting them from interacting with each other outside the home, Afghan women are gradually disappearing from the public space, and have been deprived of basic rights since the the arrival of the Taliban to power: ban on going to school or university, working without authorization or even frequenting certain spaces. It is then difficult to imagine the daily life of half the population, confined within the walls of their homes. “We have forgotten all joy, we do not know where to find it.”confided a feminist activist who fled the country to the Franco-Canadian duo.
See the world out the window
To bring this report to life, Kiana Hayeri and Mélissa Cornet met more than a hundred Afghan women. From journalists and activists to terrorized mothers, from anxious teenagers to members of the LGBTQIA+ community, each face was captured and documented with seriousness and kindness by the duo, supported by the Carmignac Foundation and Amnesty International. Result ? An exhibition at the Réfectoire des Cordeliers which can be discovered from the point of view of domestic space thanks to a particularly immersive scenography by Alice de Bortoli and her Ortiche collective. Like women, the spectator who can only observe the world through the window. Experienced as the only place where they can still express their humanity, the house becomes the scene of an entire gallery of portraits taken by Kiana Hayeri, intimate and striking.
Completed by drawings, videos and works of art created in collaboration with Afghan teenage girls, the whole is an invitation to dialogue around the situation of women in Afghanistan, but also in the world, and allows us to offer a voice to those who no longer have one. As a reminder, the investigations carried out by Amnesty International research teams in Afghanistan since the return of the Taliban to power in August 2021 characterize persecution based on gender “a possible crime against humanity”.
No Woman’s Land
From October 25, 2024 to November 18, 2024
Monday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Cordeliers Refectory
15 street of the medical school
75006 Paris
FREE ENTRANCE
More info here
November 8, 2024
