KKK (Quran School for Girls)

The title K.K.K. in Turkey stands for Quran Study Schools for Girls (Kız Kuran Kursu). The Quran has a total of 604 pages. Girls are attempting to memorize the whole the Quran. The memorization process takes three or four years according to the capability of the girls. When I was thirteen years old I too attended these Quran courses with my twin sister.

Questions and misconceptions lie behind all things hidden from plain sight yet because I am veiled too I was able to open a window to a world unknown to most others. l am as a head-scarfed woman in Istanbul automatically categorized, put into a closed box of cardboard conservatism, experienced the scarf-ban eleven years ago that forced me to leave the university, yet I am much more than that, once the metaphorical veil is lifted. I choose to find the souls of these girls and to capture my vision. As sociologist Richard Sennett says l am "trying to use my own experience as a starting point" for exploring the specific emotions in the daily life of hundreds of the Quran school girls.

With this project, l am following the voice of generations former students including mine and my twin. l want to show all the rule-breaking practices in the daily life of the school, a kind of art of resistance which breaks the dominance and which saves their creative souls and protects them from being their subaltern. Like painting their face a cloud or wearing a gorilla mask.

l want to expand my ideas on to a common platform and into the public sphere in this final chapter of my project. With these young girls, I have found a subject dear to my heart and discovered a voice that comes from within myself, but which still needs to be honed and tuned. With these portraits, my hope is to shed a bit of light and insight into the hearts and minds of these young girls who are like me, many years ago.

This project, which I plan to create a book consisting of ninety-nine medium format color film portraits for the ninety-nine names Allah to show the daily lives of the girls and their hidden emotions trying to memorize the sacred texts while still retaining the humble dreams of any young woman their age.