The history of my village. Disappeared villages, remaining voices

This event is dedicated to the people whose villages in Kurdistan disappeared, were burned down, or forcibly evacuated in the 1990s. In this context, we want to give space to their voices-each person tells his or her own story.

Our goal is to listen, to remember, and to understand what happened to these villages and the lives there-and to make the stories that would otherwise remain unheard, heard.

These narratives are not just memories, but enduring testimonies that continue to say:
“I was there. This is the story of my village.”

organized by Feykom Vienna

As part of the exhibition ZOZAN

ZOZAN artists: Halgurd Ahmad, Sabah Ahmed, Hoshang Bahjat, Friedrich Becke, Savaş Boyraz, Songül Boyraz, Asmin Buhan, DARO, Adnan Dilovan Kegi, Ezgi Erol, Pavlos Fysakis, Thomas Freiler, Karzan A. Jan, Dila Kaplan, Zeynep Kaplan, Melis Kaya, Jonas Nieft, Srusht Omer, Duygu Örs, Lisl Ponger, Layla Qadir & Kosar Mageed, Niga Salam, Dilan Salik, Nora Severios, Aram Tastekin, Rojda Tuğrul, Irene Wallner, Ruth Weismann, Meltem Yildiz

ZOZAN team: Mehmet Emir, Eva Kolm, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Eva Stockinger, with the assistance of Eszter Agota Hárs and Marina Stoilova

ZOZAN is a Kurdish term meaning summer pasture.

The starting point for the project ZOZAN are comprehensive multimedia documentations of Kurdish everyday cultures by Werner Finke and Mehmet Emir, created between 1964 and 2024 in Turkey. They reflect traditional ways of life and socio-political transformations.

Over the course of the four-year project, artistic interventions were organized based on these collections. A total of 30 artists conducted eight workshops with selected audiences in various Kurdish and European institutions. The more than 100 participants addressed questions of identity and migration, memories of past ways of life and violence as well as cultural heritage and current challenges of globalization in their drawings, collages, objects, texts, photos, films, installations and much more.

The results of these collective art processes will be presented together for the first time in this exhibition. The project is funded by the FWF.