"Lamento" will explore the expression and representation of mourning through Yazidi Kurdish laments. Lamentations in Yezidism are a kind of heroic love poetry about deceased people, usually performed during a gender-segregated mourning ritual. These performative songs work with different evocative symbols and motifs and move into thematic fields such as life, exile, diaspora, suffering, death and, last but not least, the genocide in August 2014. In a multimedia installation, an affective transnational encounter space is to be created in which the women's songs, recorded in different places, merge into an overall artistic composition. This also raises the question of whether and to what extent genocides outside the West can generate universal affects. "Lamento" is structured in two parts and consists of a continuation of the photo series "The Peacock Angel".

The documentary photographer Sonia Hamad has long devoted herself to the subject of "Kurdistan" in various chapters. In the first chapter, she portrayed Kurdish women freedom fighters in northern Syria and northern Iraq over several years for the documentary photography series "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi - Women, Life, Freedom". She received numerous awards for these large-format documentary photographs. The series has been shown nationally and internationally in group and solo exhibitions, including at the CIRCULATION(s) Festival in Paris, ENCONTROS DA IMAGEM, International Photography Festival in Braga (Portugal), Jaipur Photo Festival in India and at the Triennale der Photographie in Hamburg. Sonia Hamad lives and works as an artist in Berlin.

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