In Lyon, photographer Edith Roux exhibits her striking portraits of exiled, masked or discovered Uighurs

The “Le Bleu du Ciel” gallery, in Lyon, presents the committed work of photographer Edith Roux on the Uyghur diaspora. Some faces are uncovered, others hidden, because even in exile, they continue to be spied on by China. The exhibition is on display until March 2, 2024.

The Uighurs are subject to repression by the Chinese authorities who intern them in camps. This minority ethnic group of Muslim religion lives in China in the region of Xinjiang, called East Turkestan. On social media, Uyghurs have been portrayed as a silent voice. Often, the photographs in which they appear show a face hidden by a mask in the colors of the Uyghur flag, covered by a hand ordering them silence in the colors of the Chinese flag.

“The exiled”

Inspired by these hidden faces, Edith Roux, photographer, set out to meet them ten years ago. On the documentary frontier, she went to the autonomous region of East Turkestan, for her work entitled The Dispossesseda series of photos of which eventually resulted in a book of the same name.

Faced with the scale of the tragedy and the difficulty of accessing the detainees in the camps, she decided to travel around the world to photograph “the exiles”, the name of the second exhibition. It presents a gallery of 30 portraits of the Uighur diaspora taken in different cities: Paris, Munich, Istanbul, Washington…

“Unlike the Chinese government which dehumanizes them by sending them to camps, what I try to do is not show them as victims, but to present them in all their humanity and the richness of their culture .”

Even when they reside outside their country, Uyghurs are under close surveillance by Chinese authorities. The artist therefore took into account the desire of some of them not to reveal their identity, replacing their face with a blurred specular surface.

There are faces that are hard to forget. For Gilles Verneret, director of the gallery The blue of the skyphotography raises awareness, beyond being an artistic tool and historical archive: “What has always motivated me are injustices. We live in a world where there is urgency, and it seems to me that art must reflect this urgency,” he explains.

A culture threatened with disappearance

The photos also reveal their adaptation to their new life as exiles. Thus scenes of daily life in the West where small objects of Uyghur culture, dishes or traditional clothing rub shoulders with traces of their assimilation in their respective host countries.

The photos are accompanied by extracts of calligraphic Uyghur poetic texts and music. Note that Uyghur “muqam”, a set of popular or classical dance songs and music, was included in 2008 by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. The objective of the exhibition is for each visitor to take with them fragments of these poems and the memories of these photos, with the aim of perpetuating the Uyghur culture threatened with disappearance. A real work of memory.