101 Beads : Kurdistan In War is a photographic representation of liminality and violence. Using photographs from Iraqi Kurdistan that were captured in over two years during regional conflict, it depicts the collectivity of struggle and plight. Images from the frontline, refugee camps and detention centres are used to express the flux of war and its consequences for the psychological, physical, and metaphysical landscape of Kurdistan and its people. The book’s photographer, himself from Kurdistan, attempts to disparage many assumptions of the Middle-East and even of violence itself.​​

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The pages are presented as a preface to an aesthetic perspective that recognises the strange void that rests between First World ethical consumption and the realities of Third World experience, and it does this by introducing photographs of ‘the everyday’ - liberated from de-contextualisation, glorification, or marketisation – to attack this gap in the modern exchange of global images. By using it’s reserved and at times ironic realism, it urges a reconciliation between the antagonism central to Western humanitarian viewership (and the activism that normally follows), and the banality, absurdity and brutality of real conflict. It is for this reason that the book seeks to banish a certain romanticisation that is often subscribed in Western portrayals of Kurdish militarism.​

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CREDIT

Ethnography Researcher: Benjamin Houghton

Production Manager: Fryal Faisel

Designer: Sam Gorham

Videographer: Rega Ahmad

Graphic: Halgurd M Tahir

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