Untold Stories, Unseen Lives
Photographer Çiğdem Yüksel's work aims to restore migrant women from Turkey to their rightful place in Dutch history.
Photographer Çiğdem Yüksel grew up with what she calls "very stereotyped images" of people who looked like her grandmother, part of the first generation of women from Turkey to migrate to the Netherlands.
"But I knew from her life that there was much more to those women's stories," Yüksel told me over a coffee in Rotterdam, where the Nederlands Fotomuseum is currently featuring her work. Yüksel’s solo exhibition, If only you knew, combines the artist’s contemporary portraits of migrant women from Turkey with archival photos from their own family albums and vivid interviews about their struggles, successes, and everyday lives.
“For the first ten years in the Netherlands, I didn’t hang my clothes up in the closet. I kept them in my suitcase, ready for when I would return to Turkey,” one of her subjects, Necibe Akbulut from Iğdır, recalled. “I have lived here for fifty years now, this is my second homeland.”
Though there is of course much hardship and homesickness reflected in the women’s stories, there is also much humor and joy. Many speak with surprising fondness about their jobs as cleaners or factory workers, recalling not only pride in their work but also friendships with colleagues who helped them learn Dutch or who gathered together to share meals from their diverse homelands.
“Work was a way out of the house, out of the patriarchal structures of their own husbands or in-laws. It was a kind of freedom over one’s own social environment,” Yüksel said. “That’s a perspective we don’t really know in the Netherlands.”
Like Germany, the Netherlands had its own “guest worker” program for migrants from Turkey following WWII, during which around 1 in 10 registered workers were women. The official recruitment drive from 1964 to 1973 was followed by a period of family reunification which formalized the process for workers to bring their families to join them. The accounts gathered by Yüksel show how women were not just passive participants in this process but also played an active role.
One of the women featured in the exhibition recalls how she defied her in-laws to join her husband abroad; another threatened her husband with divorce if he didn’t take her with him. “My husband decided to leave me and the children behind in Turkey. I took a photograph with the children in a photography studio and sent it to him. ‘Are you still coming to get us?’” a third, Feride Toper from Bergama, recalled. “When I didn’t hear anything back, I sold my bracelets and went to the Netherlands with my children.”
The studio photograph Toper sent to her husband all those decades ago is included in the exhibition along with hundreds of other family photos, documenting weddings, pregnancies, holidays, family outings, work, meals with friends, and regular evenings at home in living rooms decked out in very 1970s outfits and furniture.
“We all have those kinds of photos in our own albums, but in our collective memory, these women only appear when it comes to issues about Islam, migration, or integration,” Yüksel said. Research she carried out in 2020 and 2022 showed how limited the depictions of Muslim women were in the Dutch media, contributing to the perpetuation of stereotypes. Moreover, as she noted in the introduction to a book accompanying the exhibition, the women from Turkey who came to the Netherlands included “Turks, Kurds, Georgians, Armenians, Bosnians, Alevis, Sunnis, Shiites, atheists, and many more.”
One of the few Dutch photographers to break through stereotypes about migrants was Bertien van Manen, whose 1979 project Women as guests portrayed many aspects of their lives, including the founding of a little-known association of women from Turkey in the Netherlands that stood up for women’s rights at home and in the factory workplace.
“She opened up a new world for me,” Yüksel said of van Manen, some of whose photos are also included in If only you knew. Yüksel followed up with some of the women van Manen photographed in the 1970s to see how their lives had turned out and how they remembered those days. With all of her subjects, she went through their old photo albums together, identifying images that were meaningful to them to include in the exhibition.
Yüksel has few photos of her own grandmother, Zeynep, who died when the artist was 14. “My memories of her are fragmented. Gold bracelets, orange fingers covered in henna, the colorful patterns on her clothing,” Yüksel writes in her book.
For the exhibition, Yüksel turned some of these patterns into cozy soft furniture – an attempt to convey a “physical and tactile sense of the emotional warmth” she received from her grandmother – that visitors can sit on inside a yurt-like tent. Here, a three-screen video work imagines Zeynep’s journey from a small village in Turkey to an apartment block and fish factory in Ijmuiden, a port city the Netherlands.
“I created a story, a fairytale in my head,” Yüksel writes in the book. “I don’t know who she really was. I tried to find the answer to my question with other women of her generation.” In doing so, she has also illuminated not only an invisible part of recent history but the distinct, defiantly individual lives of women who faced her camera proudly, full of stories to tell.
The exhibition If only you knew is at the Nederlands Fotomuseum until 23 May (Wilhelminakade 332, Rotterdam; open Tuesday-Sunday 11am-5pm, adult admission €16). The accompanying book of the same name is available from nai010 publishers in English, Turkish, or Dutch editions. Çiğdem Yüksel also shares work from the project on her Instagram account and via her Substack newsletter.
I have seen this exhibition in Rotterdam, and it is well-worth a visit. The stories of this first-generation group of Turkish women are interesting, but also unknown. For the Dutch, it has not been easy to connect with this group, because of language or social reasons.