Dr Rebecka Jinks is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway. She joins us to share her experience of researching and curating the ground-breaking exhibition ‘Genocidal Captivity: Retelling the Stories of Armenian and Yezidi Women’ at the Wiener Holocaust Library.
This exhibition (21 February 2024 – 31 May 2024) explored stories of Armenian and Yezidi women held in genocidal captivity, using humanitarian records of Armenian survivors from the 1920s and recent interviews with and compelling portraits of Yezidi survivors in Iraq. In 1915, during the Armenian genocide, tens of thousands of women and girls were ‘absorbed’ into Turkish, Kurdish, or Arab households. They became Muslim wives, servants, slaves, and daughters and their Christian Armenian identity was officially erased. In the aftermath, some escaped or were rescued by aid organisations, and they rejoined the Armenian refugee community. Almost a century later, in 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) conquered the Sinjar region in Iraq and took captive thousands of Yezidi women and girls. Labelled ‘infidels’ because of their non-Abrahamic religion, they were forced to convert. Most were sold into sexual slavery amongst ISIS members. In the years following, they managed to escape from their captors or were smuggled out by family members, and they rejoined the displaced Yezidi community. The exhibition asked: Who gets to tell the stories of genocide survivors, and how much control do they have over how their experiences are retold? This exhibition was organised as part of The Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, and the Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation for the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership.
Organised by Dr Klara Kemp-Welch (Reader in 20th Century Modernism) and Dr Robin Schuldenfrei (Tangen Reader in 20th Century Modernism), The Courtauld, as part of the research cluster Migrations: People, Borders, Objects.
