No woman’s land
Mélissa Cornet & Kiana Hayeri
To 29 November
An intimate look at the situation of women’s rights in Afghanistan
From January to June 2024, Kiana Hayeri and Mélissa Cornet traveled across Afghanistan, investigating the living conditions imposed on women and girls by the Taliban. They met around a hundred Afghan women locked in their homes. They documented how the Taliban systematically eliminated women from public life, taking away their most basic rights: to go to school, to university, to work, to dress as they wished. At the end of August 2024, the Taliban regime further tightened its control by enacting a new law requiring women to cover their faces with masks and forbidding them to raise their voices in public.
This exhibition is the winner of the 14th edition of the Carmignac Photojournalism Prize and is presented as part of the Impulsions Femmes festival in partnership with the City of Niort. In two parts – indoors at the Pavillon Grappelli and in the walled garden of the Villa Pérochon – it presents this work in a variety of media: photographs, drawings, videos, as well as works created in collaboration with Afghan teenage girls.
Opening on Thursday November 6 at 5pm at La Villa Pérochon, then at 6:30pm at Pavillon Grappelli.
Practical info
Production, distribution, editing assistance : Fondation Carmignac
Co-organizers: Ville de Niort, Festival Impulsions Femmes, Villa Pérochon
Partners : Festisol, Amnesty International
Kiana Hayeri
Kiana Hayeriphotojournalist, was born in Teheran in 1988. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2021 for her Where Prison is a Kind of Freedom series, documenting the lives of Afghan women in the jails of Herat, Afghanistan. In 2022, Kiana was part of the team of New York Times journalists whose investigation “The Collapse of Afghanistan” won the Hal Boyle Award. Kiana Hayeri is a regular contributor to The New York Times and National Geographic. She is currently based in Sarajevo, where she reports from the Balkans, Afghanistan and other regions.
Mélissa Cornet
Mélissa Cornet is a researcher on human rights issues. A recognized expert on women’s rights in Afghanistan, she worked in the country from January 2018 until after the fall of Kabul, conducting research on their economic emancipation, their involvement in elections and the peace process, and the violence perpetrated against them. Mélissa Cornet has been interviewed by numerous French newspapers and international media, including The Guardian, BBC, Voice of America, The Times and PBS (Frontline).
