ROOM 16

Cheryl Mukherji (b. 1995) is a visual artist and writer from New Delhi, India. She holds an MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from the International Center of Photography-Bard College, New York. Cheryl has been a recipient of the ICP Director’s Fellowship for the years 2018-2020. In her current work, Cheryl explores the idea of origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of her mother and her presence in the family album. It deals with memory, personal history, transgenerational trauma, and how they inform identity. She primarily works with photography, text, video, and printmaking. Cheryl has been the recent recipient of Brooklyn Museum’s #Your2020Portrait award, Firecracker Photography Grant, 2020, South Asian Arts Resiliency Fund (SAARF), and has been nominated for the new Aperture–Baxter St Next Step Award, 2020. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, NY, Museum of Moving Image, NY, International Center of Photography, NY, Serendipity Arts Festival, India. Promise Me is an exploration of my origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of my mother. It deals with memory, mental illness, transgenerational trauma, and how they inform identity using mediums such as photography, text, video, printmaking, and embroidery. Family albums— a primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation— traditionally celebrate success, leaving out depictions of tragedy from family life. I combine my mother’s images from my albums with personal writing, recollecting memories of my last day at home with her before moving to the US two years ago. It was the day she, overcome by a manic episode, self-harmed in front of me. After the incident, I began watching my mother through a live surveillance feed. The cameras were installed in our family home to watch over our sick dog four years ago. After our dog passed away, no one removed the cameras and they continued to watch us. I use surveillance as a medium to understand my role as a caregiver to my mother. Having outgrown our customary familial roles through distance, I watch her out of concern for her health and my homesickness in a new country. It becomes a tool for intimacy, longing across 8,500 miles and subverts the oppressive nature of surveillance as a medium to track and control bodies. I explore the idea of becoming my mother after she repeatedly warns me not to become like her, exposing my anxiety that I’m becoming her. I use repetition in writing to gain control of this anxiety as I type on several prints and sew onto fabric, owing to the idea that repeating is synonymous with learning and healing. Truth in familial narratives passed on from one generation to another are filtered to fit the myth of a happy family. By using archival photographs, I examine the role of family albums in shaping our notions of a family in patriarchy as complicated feminine histories remain unacknowledged in family trees and other written documents—alive only in oral recollections.

Jakub Stanek was born in 1988 in Warsaw, Poland. He studied photography at Academy Of Photography in Warsaw and Philosophy At University of Warsaw. In 2014 He started Sputnik Mentoring Program. For many years he has been connected with Milan where he worked on documentary and commercial projects. In 2015 he has been chosen to 50 the best polish photographers „Debuts 2015”. Stanek is trying to bring new perspectives to viewers. He explores untold subjects. During documentary projects he is trying to start intimate dialogue between himself and characters. He also aspires to add layers of visual and emotional information based on cultural knowledge. All his interests and inspirations evolve around the modern human, yet. ​ His projects have been showed in: ​ / Norblin Factory Warsaw) / Radna Gallery (Warsaw) / Museum of Humanity / Debuts 2015 (Fotofestiwal Łódź) / Debuts 2015 (Offoto Opole) / Debuts 2015 (Warsaw photo Days) / Photomonth Riga 2017 (Riga) / Leica Gallery 2018 (Warszawa) / Sztuka Wyboru 2018 (Warszaswa) /Kraków photomonth /Slideluck edytorial /Photon ​ Books / Debuts 2015 / Sputnik no 4 / The man without past / Trip to mars / 50 tysięcy przecinających się dróg The project "Waiting for the Sun" arose out of the need to explain to the 3-year-old son why he cannot leave the house for 6 days despite the fact that he is healthy. The project started at the beginning of 2017, when smog alerts turned red, and the indicators in Poland exceeded all acceptable standards. It was then that air pollution in Rybnik surpassed the level of smog in China. From my first attempt to explain to Kajtkowo what is going on, there are two things left - a simple drawing in black shadow, showing the smog and the title of the project "Waiting for the Sun". It was then that the need to understand what smog and air pollution caused it to actually rise. I wanted to understand it enough to explain it to my son later. By learning about the effects of smog on people, animals and plants, and by analyzing the causes of its formation, I realized that it would be a very personal story. Not only about my son, but about the many years of my struggle with asthma, lung and bronchial diseases, which intensify in winter. ‘I too believed we could defend ourselves. I answered questions. I wove a tale of verbs and adjectives, with exclamation points! Kajtek covered a sheet of paper as white as snow with grey and black graphite. We spun the globe, seeking to pinpoint the dragon’s lair. Brush-stroked Chinese characters appeared before my mind’s eye. Cough. I cannot speak. I cannot write. But I can look. I can show. The idea expelled itself from me like a cough. Biological, organic. An unconditional reflex of a concept. I owe it to my son. To you, too. And to the planet. To exhibit smog to the world. To expose its nebulous face. Something stopped us that day. We were held motionless, in anticipation of the sun..’ ‘W oczekiwaniu na słońce’ (‘In Anticipation of the Sun’) arose from the artist’s need to explain air pollution to his son. These photographs present smog as a silent killer, destroying bodies from within, penetrating soil, water and air. It confronts the use of fuel and plastic while exploring the artist’s personal struggle with lung and bronchial diseases caused by air pollution.

Born in '82 in Ustrzyki Dolne (Poland), currently lives in Rzeszow in Poland. Kruk graduated from Archival and Historical Studies at the University of Rzeszow. At present, a photography student at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. Fujifilm Poland ambassador. Freelance documentary photographer focused on long-term documentary projects. Honored (Jury Special Mention) in the Grand Press Photo 2020 contest in Poland in the documentary category. Winner in the long-term project category in the Slovak Press Photo 2021. Shortlisted in Open Call International TIFF FESTIVAL 2020 (Wroclaw, Poland). Shortlisted in Open Call FORMAT FESTIVAL 2021 (Derby, UK) In my project, which I have been working on since 2017, I am trying to document my wife's autoaggressive disease – myopathy. My wife, Małgorzata (37), lives from day to day, waking up stiff with pain in the morning, wondering how much she can go through each day. The images were created at various times, trying to construct a portrait of pain and everyday suffering. Myopathy is a general medical term used to describe a number of conditions affecting the muscles. All myopathies cause muscle weakness. Chronic inflammatory myopathies cannot be cured. Myopathy is a mitochondrial disease, which is also a hereditary disease in the maternal line transmitted by women. The survival rate is estimated at approx. 10 years. 1 in 15,000 people suffer from mitochondrial disease. Instagram @pankruk

Born in 1975 in Ivrea, Italy. Marco Di Noia is a freelance multimedia designer and filmmaker currently based in Berlin. He works across a broad range of visual practices, including motion and graphic design, filmmaking, ​and photography. Hong Kong, Ga Yau is a documentary project about the protest movement that shook Hong Kong in 2019. The movement was triggered by a proposed law that would have allowed the extraditions to mainland China of Hong Kong citizens, but soon it morphed into a larger revolt against China’s control over the semiautonomous city. Clashes between riot police and protesters often erupted during rallies and marches calling for democratic freedoms and independent inquiry into the police behaviour. Protesters were questioning the core of the Sino-British Joint Declaration: the 1997 deal between London and Beijing based on the principle of “one nation - two system”, a strange architecture meant to preserve, for 50 years, Hong Kong lifestyle and freedoms in the framework of a nation ruled by the strong grip of the Chinese Communist party. The system, if ever was something, is clearly crumbling: things are changing very fast, and the influence and the policies imposed by Beijing are shrinking Hong Kong liberties and shaping the way of life of its population. Through images of the demonstrations and audio interviews, Hong Kong, Ga Yau tells the story of a popular protest: the population of the former British colony is struggling with accepting China's rule of law, which comes with reduced freedoms and civil rights. Into the frame-set of the harshest economic and geopolitical confrontation between USA and China, rallies and marches calling for reforms became the expression of a discontent, likely to reverberate for a long time. In June 2020, Beijing passed a new national security law for Hong Kong, the vagueness of the law provides the frame-set to definitely suppress any freedom of expression and persecutes activists and democratic organizations. What has been imposed is de facto a police state at low intensity, arbitrary and brutal arrests are carried out whenever people gather trying to express democratic values, independent opinions, or any idea that is somehow challenging Beijing’s doctrine. Books are being censored, media outlet harassed, activist arrested. The level of civil rights and freedom in the city is deteriorating and the situation is leaving little hope for the future. Hong Kong, Ga Yau is part of a documentary project about contemporary China, a photo and video research, meant to decrypt the landscape, the social structure and the geopolitics of a country which has become in a few decades a global power and a protagonist of our time.

Born in 1975 in Ivrea, Italy. Marco Di Noia is a freelance multimedia designer and filmmaker currently based in Berlin. He works across a broad range of visual practices, including motion and graphic design, filmmaking, ​and photography. Hong Kong, Ga Yau is a documentary project about the protest movement that shook Hong Kong in 2019. The movement was triggered by a proposed law that would have allowed the extraditions to mainland China of Hong Kong citizens, but soon it morphed into a larger revolt against China’s control over the semiautonomous city. Clashes between riot police and protesters often erupted during rallies and marches calling for democratic freedoms and independent inquiry into the police behaviour. Protesters were questioning the core of the Sino-British Joint Declaration: the 1997 deal between London and Beijing based on the principle of “one nation - two system”, a strange architecture meant to preserve, for 50 years, Hong Kong lifestyle and freedoms in the framework of a nation ruled by the strong grip of the Chinese Communist party. The system, if ever was something, is clearly crumbling: things are changing very fast, and the influence and the policies imposed by Beijing are shrinking Hong Kong liberties and shaping the way of life of its population. Through images of the demonstrations and audio interviews, Hong Kong, Ga Yau tells the story of a popular protest: the population of the former British colony is struggling with accepting China's rule of law, which comes with reduced freedoms and civil rights. Into the frame-set of the harshest economic and geopolitical confrontation between USA and China, rallies and marches calling for reforms became the expression of a discontent, likely to reverberate for a long time. In June 2020, Beijing passed a new national security law for Hong Kong, the vagueness of the law provides the frame-set to definitely suppress any freedom of expression and persecutes activists and democratic organizations. What has been imposed is de facto a police state at low intensity, arbitrary and brutal arrests are carried out whenever people gather trying to express democratic values, independent opinions, or any idea that is somehow challenging Beijing’s doctrine. Books are being censored, media outlet harassed, activist arrested. The level of civil rights and freedom in the city is deteriorating and the situation is leaving little hope for the future. Hong Kong, Ga Yau is part of a documentary project about contemporary China, a photo and video research, meant to decrypt the landscape, the social structure and the geopolitics of a country which has become in a few decades a global power and a protagonist of our time.

Born in 1975 in Ivrea, Italy. Marco Di Noia is a freelance multimedia designer and filmmaker currently based in Berlin. He works across a broad range of visual practices, including motion and graphic design, filmmaking, ​and photography. Hong Kong, Ga Yau is a documentary project about the protest movement that shook Hong Kong in 2019. The movement was triggered by a proposed law that would have allowed the extraditions to mainland China of Hong Kong citizens, but soon it morphed into a larger revolt against China’s control over the semiautonomous city. Clashes between riot police and protesters often erupted during rallies and marches calling for democratic freedoms and independent inquiry into the police behaviour. Protesters were questioning the core of the Sino-British Joint Declaration: the 1997 deal between London and Beijing based on the principle of “one nation - two system”, a strange architecture meant to preserve, for 50 years, Hong Kong lifestyle and freedoms in the framework of a nation ruled by the strong grip of the Chinese Communist party. The system, if ever was something, is clearly crumbling: things are changing very fast, and the influence and the policies imposed by Beijing are shrinking Hong Kong liberties and shaping the way of life of its population. Through images of the demonstrations and audio interviews, Hong Kong, Ga Yau tells the story of a popular protest: the population of the former British colony is struggling with accepting China's rule of law, which comes with reduced freedoms and civil rights. Into the frame-set of the harshest economic and geopolitical confrontation between USA and China, rallies and marches calling for reforms became the expression of a discontent, likely to reverberate for a long time. In June 2020, Beijing passed a new national security law for Hong Kong, the vagueness of the law provides the frame-set to definitely suppress any freedom of expression and persecutes activists and democratic organizations. What has been imposed is de facto a police state at low intensity, arbitrary and brutal arrests are carried out whenever people gather trying to express democratic values, independent opinions, or any idea that is somehow challenging Beijing’s doctrine. Books are being censored, media outlet harassed, activist arrested. The level of civil rights and freedom in the city is deteriorating and the situation is leaving little hope for the future. Hong Kong, Ga Yau is part of a documentary project about contemporary China, a photo and video research, meant to decrypt the landscape, the social structure and the geopolitics of a country which has become in a few decades a global power and a protagonist of our time.

Shelli Weiler is an artist from New York with a BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University, where she studied photography amongst other digital arts practices. Her work primarily revolves around the production of fantasy and its failure, using portraiture to document performance in a non-documentarian way. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. "ENJOY house" documents the rise and proliferation of made-for-Instagram selfie factories throughout New York and Los Angeles, presenting such forms of escapist amusement as hostile and uninhabitable environments. Subjects and spaces are produced in the pursuit of ideals, where sites for entertainment are fashioned by their shortcomings. Through the negation of color, this series focuses on how the construction of fantasy inevitably entails its own failure. A cold atmosphere emerges from the accumulation of disparate places and their visitors, all of whom become actors participating in the same theater. This theater consists of costumed spaces that take on the appearance of purgatories rather than playgrounds. By photographing moments of authenticity at the height of artifice, I look at the ways people manufacture themselves to conform to the props that surround and confine them. The discovery in each picture lies in the decontextualization of activity, where non performances take center stage and expectations of glamour evacuate in the physicalization of desire. The formal simplicity of grey scale attests to this symbolic power, emphasizing a generation’s inheritance of a modern empty experience.

“And stay in your houses. Bedizen not yourselves with the bedizenment of the Time of Ignorance. Be regular in prayer, and pay the poor-due, and obey Allah and His messenger. Allah's wish is but to remove uncleanness far from you, O Folk of the Household, and cleanse you with a thorough cleansing.” Ahzab chapter of Quran 33.

My name is Sima Choubdarzadeh. I am 32 years old from Iran. When I was a little girl my father bought me photography books. I remember that I looked at them most times and it remained in my back of mind. Because I did not take photography in that time seriously and I did not want to be a photographer, I was a girl who always thought and because of that I studied philosophy at university at MA. Though I love philosophy, I have to relate it in my life and make it practical and concrete. It is really difficult for me to find a way: I concluded that art is the solution of my dilemma. I tried some art classes like music, dancing and woodcarving but all of them did not cure my mind engagement. I have been doing photography for 3 years. Now I am really pleased. I can make a balance between my rationality and emotion. They dance with each other. I was seven years old when I got scared for the first time. I was getting back from school when my friend told me: “Did you know that if you reveal your hair out of your scarf, God will punish you by hanging you from it?” One day my husband locked me up in the house to stop me from reading books, going to the university, seeing my family, and involving with society. It was the same day when an earthquake hit our city and I was locked up in a house on the 10th floor. I had not paid attention to the rules and traditions before my marriage, which ended up to a tragic divorce, shortly after. The focus in my story and photos is on the rules and the traditions that are stemmed from religions, and the religious principles. Some of these religious teachings have established the inequality between men and women. These religious principals have been implemented to the constitution by the Islamic Republic of Iran. For example, based on the inequality between men and woman, men inherit twice the women, and also are entitled to the blood money twice the women. Many women are in the government prison as guilty of showing their hair. All they wanted was to let the breeze dance with their hair. Singing is forbidden for girls and women. There is no space to develop and grow. The tyrant governments always use the religion as the best and strongest lever to control the people. Artwork caption: Maryam is looking at her son who is playing in the alley from her own balcony.

Atefeh is brought up in religious and traditional family. She always tries and fights to develop her logic and her life style. Her husband did not allowe her to continue her university.

"And say to the believing women, that they lower their gaze cast down their eyes and guard their chastity, and do not reveal their adornment except that which is outward (face and hands); and let them draw their veils over their neck, and not reveal their adornment except to their husbands..." Quran

Mitra has not been allowed to meet her son after her divorce. She is tattooing her son’s name and her name in her hand. “Civil Code 1314 of Article 1169 states that custody of a son up to two years of age and a daughter to seven years of age has been entrusted to the mother and that the custody of the child is with the father after the expiry of this period.”

The teenage girl, Romina Ashrafi, was murdered by her father as an act of "honor killing" in May in northern Iran's rural Talesh county.

This is me, Sima. I am not a religious person nor a prostitute. I have taken off a cruel costume. “Get married to virgin women because their mouths are sweeter and more compassionate. They learn something early and their love is more enduring” Prophet Muhammad said.

Sharia-based Iranian law states that the legal age for marriage is 13 for girls and 15 for boys, but marriages can still be carried out at a younger age with the consent of fathers and permission from court judges.

Sahar Khodayari , also known as Blue Girl, was an Iranian woman known for setting herself on fire in front of the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Tehran on 2 September 2019. She was protesting a possible sentence of six months in prison for having tried to enter a public stadium to watch a football game, against the national ban against women at such events. She died a week later of her injuries.

"This is a commandment from your Lord: After the payment of debts or anything bequeathed, let the male inherit twice as much as the female…" Quran

Sophia Evans was born in Malawi and spent her childhood in Nicaragua and Belize. She has a degree in Latin American Studies and also studied at The London College of Printing. She has won numerous awards including the Visa Pour L’Image Canon Woman Photojournalist of the Year Award in 2002 for her photographic study around Pearl Lagoon, along the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, and the American award Fifty Crows International Fund for Documentary Photography for her essay titled ‘Dirty Oil Business’ about the effect of oil giants like Shell on the lives of people living in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. Driven by her interest in the unconscious and a focus on her own mental and psychological states, Evans will use a controlled space with borders around it much like the safety of the psychoanalyst’s consulting room to explore her own internal world of emotions, fantasy, and memories. To me it was clear that Boris Johnson’s government put profits before people, if we had gone into lockdown earlier thousands of lives could have been saved. By mid March I was gripped to the horrific news coming from Italy. My anxiety levels were so out of control that I started to have panic attacks, I had to go on Prozac just to get a grip on my mind. During the first months of Lockdown I disinfected everything around me, my hands were red and scaly, I washed all the clothes in Dettol, and I washed all the fruits and vegetables and eggs with soap… In mid May I took my usual restricted exercise in the Hackney marshes only this time I walked further. The sun was shining and it was hot. I walked to the old golf course, essentially an overgrown field, where I spotted quite a few people basking in the sun in Brazilian style bikinis and tiny swimming trunks. I was curious - I walked through the tall trees and bushes to take a look at the river. It was as if I had entered another world, some kind of therapy river, some kind of river of life. I walked straight into the water fully clothed. I saw splashing, I saw light bouncing on the water, I saw colour, I heard salsa and cumbia music coming from the banks of the river, I saw people touching each other and couples dancing, drinking beer, I saw hugging, I heard Spanish around me, the language of my childhood, I saw parakeets and elderflowers and Lombardy poplars, I caught myself not thinking about disinfectant and death. My body relaxed and some rusty Spanish started to escape from my tongue. I see the river as a physical space, but more importantly a psychological space. A secret place contrasting hugely with what was happening outside this space. Government lockdown restrictions about hugging, touching and contact with people disappeared when you entered the space. At the river the rules were being rejected - a libertarian space, anarchical even, compared to the austere, fearful outside world.

Born in 1975 in Ivrea, Italy. Marco Di Noia is a freelance multimedia designer and filmmaker currently based in Berlin. He works across a broad range of visual practices, including motion and graphic design, filmmaking, ​and photography. Hong Kong, Ga Yau is a documentary project about the protest movement that shook Hong Kong in 2019. The movement was triggered by a proposed law that would have allowed the extraditions to mainland China of Hong Kong citizens, but soon it morphed into a larger revolt against China’s control over the semiautonomous city. Clashes between riot police and protesters often erupted during rallies and marches calling for democratic freedoms and independent inquiry into the police behaviour. Protesters were questioning the core of the Sino-British Joint Declaration: the 1997 deal between London and Beijing based on the principle of “one nation - two system”, a strange architecture meant to preserve, for 50 years, Hong Kong lifestyle and freedoms in the framework of a nation ruled by the strong grip of the Chinese Communist party. The system, if ever was something, is clearly crumbling: things are changing very fast, and the influence and the policies imposed by Beijing are shrinking Hong Kong liberties and shaping the way of life of its population. Through images of the demonstrations and audio interviews, Hong Kong, Ga Yau tells the story of a popular protest: the population of the former British colony is struggling with accepting China's rule of law, which comes with reduced freedoms and civil rights. Into the frame-set of the harshest economic and geopolitical confrontation between USA and China, rallies and marches calling for reforms became the expression of a discontent, likely to reverberate for a long time. In June 2020, Beijing passed a new national security law for Hong Kong, the vagueness of the law provides the frame-set to definitely suppress any freedom of expression and persecutes activists and democratic organizations. What has been imposed is de facto a police state at low intensity, arbitrary and brutal arrests are carried out whenever people gather trying to express democratic values, independent opinions, or any idea that is somehow challenging Beijing’s doctrine. Books are being censored, media outlet harassed, activist arrested. The level of civil rights and freedom in the city is deteriorating and the situation is leaving little hope for the future. Hong Kong, Ga Yau is part of a documentary project about contemporary China, a photo and video research, meant to decrypt the landscape, the social structure and the geopolitics of a country which has become in a few decades a global power and a protagonist of our time.