'Du Rê'

‘Du Rê’, Kurmanji Kurdish for ‘two roads’, is a body of work undertaken in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq between October 2024 and June 2025.

‘Du Rê’, Kurmanji Kurdish for ‘two roads’, is a body of work undertaken in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq between October 2024 and June 2025.

The work reflexively traces ‘two roads’ significant in Kurdish history - from Batel village to Chale in the Zagros Mountains, and from Koreme village to Nazarke Castle in Duhok City, making images of landscapes that bore witness to - and continue to serve as - repositories of memory endemic to the Kurdish people.

Between 1978 and 1979 alone, 600 Kurdish villages were burned down and around 200,000 Kurds were deported to other parts of Iraq. Refugees fled from Batel Village to the Turkish border, remaining in the mountains until they could either emigrate or safely return to reclaim their homes from departed Iraqi settlers.

The Anfal Campaign of the mid 1980’s again sought to 'Arabise strategic parts of the Kirkuk Governate’, with the elimination of mainly rural Kurdish communities by the Ba’athist Regime. Koreme village, chosen by Human Rights Watch as an exemplar of the regime’s tactics, detailed the atrocities carried out on the villagers and the fate of the 250 or so survivors brought to Nazarke Castle for incarceration and further deportation to other detention camps until the campaign ended.

The aim is to ensure the resulting project reads as an empathetic body of work, photographed through a sober lens, reflecting an aspect of the atrocities inflicted on the Kurdish community, still without a state to call their own.