Reframing Belonging

With her exhibition If Only You Knew: The First Generation of Women from Turkey in the Netherlands at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, Turkish-Dutch visual artist and photographer Çiğdem Yüksel undertakes nothing less than the task of establishing a place for the first generation of Turkish immigrant women within Dutch visual heritage. She sets out to achieve this by collecting and presenting the personal stories of twenty-two women who arrived in the country during the late 1960s and 1970s as part of the Netherlands’ post-World War II reconstruction efforts. Using video interviews, collected family photographs, and new portrait photography, Yüksel’s explicit aim is to create a representative archive that preserves these histories and integrates them into Dutch history and collective memory.

The artist’s endeavour to amplify the voices of Turkish female immigrants stemmed from a personal realization: Yüksel, whose grandmother belonged to this generation, found no comprehensive archive in the Netherlands documenting the lives of these women. Acknowledging the precariousness of these histories as this generation ages, she sought to establish a representative multimedia collection, which effort clearly reflects photography theorist Ariella Azoulay’s observation on the “archive frenzy” of our time (213). Using Israeli-Palestinian examples to illustrate how traditional, state-controlled “sovereign” archives can serve as tools of exclusion and hegemonic control that perpetuates selective memory, Azoulay emphasizes the important role of alternative, non-state photography archives for collecting and narrating historical knowledge about marginalized communities like that of Turkish women in the Netherlands.

Amid the current European political climate marked by the rise of right-wing nationalism, If Only You Knew illustrates how a Dutch national museum—in the role of the “gatekeeper and sanctifier of cultural values” (Løgstrup 129)—could foreground perspectives that have been historically excluded from dominant cultural narratives in the Netherlands. In fact, the Nederlands Fotomuseum reflects on this in the exhibition’s introduction, stating its aim to counterbalance current public discourses that often portray immigrants as enemies. However, as I will argue by examining this exhibition, when institutional exhibition producers fail to adopt new languages or to provide meaningful space for alternative narratives to fully develop, they risk affirming the prevailing narratives they aim to disrupt by presenting underrepresented histories.

In terms of displayed material, the exhibition presents fascinating stories from an array of lived experiences that together sketch the collective yet fragmented history of Turkish immigrant women. The wall texts and video interviews reveal, for example, that while some stayed at home to manage the household and take care of children, most immediately took on cleaning (Selvet Șükür) or manufacturing jobs in canning factories (Esma Turgut Özçelik), the textile industry (Güllü Çetin), or chocolate factories like the Droste factory in Haarlem (Türkan Köycü) to secure resident permits after arriving. Similarly, we also learn that often it was husbands who moved to the Netherlands first, leaving their wives and children behind. This is why Feripe Toper, for instance, sent a photograph of herself and their five children to her husband urging him to bring the family to the Netherlands, and when he did not respond, she sold her bracelets to fund their journey to Western Europe. Overall, these accounts offer visitors a glimpse into the joys and challenges of relocation from a female perspective, including opportunities for professional growth and education, emancipation, family struggles, homesickness and discrimination.

By featuring such stories, If Only You Knew emerges as a deliberate attempt to renegotiate the border between memorable and unmemorable lives, as Ann Rigney puts it in “Remaking Memory and the Agency of the Aesthetic.” In this work, Rigney argues that artistically constructed narratives can play a crucial role in transforming “inert” (Jeffrey K. Olick, Joyce Robbins) or “disabled” (Ann Laura Stoler) memories into new sites of memorability, potentially addressing the gap between ethnically homogenous national imaginaries and the multi-racial, multi-ethnic reality of contemporary European societies (13). Rigney points out that aesthetically crafted works can reconfigure, or at least suspend, the imagined boundary between “us” and the “other,” because “when we ‘keep company’ with strangers in the suspended time of listening or reading” (17), our traditional patterns of identification are disrupted, and new affiliations can form. In the context of the exhibition, Yüksel makes overlooked and unfamiliar narratives stand out and be remembered by amplifying deeply personal stories along with intimate and candid portrait photographs, eventually creating new sites of memorability and allowing for the possibility of redefining “the borders of imagined communities with which individuals identify” (Rigney 18).

At the same time, the exhibition also confronts us with the difficulty of listening to voices that were silenced and rendered non-existent in dominant representational frameworks. This challenge is evident in Yüksel’s most personal work, Grandma (n.d.), a three-channel video installation at the exhibition’s core. This piece reflects Yüksel’s search for her grandmother’s story, whom she lost at fourteen and remembers only in fragments. Unable to find traces of her grandmother in the 1970s IJmuiden archives, Yüksel tries to fill the gaps in her memory by combining the little she knows with her imagination to reconstruct a possible version of her grandmother’s life. For instance, she retraces her grandma’s likely path to work at the fish processing plant, combining footage of these revisited locations with archival photographs of fish plant workers, family images of her grandmother, and fictional video elements, while reflecting on the fragmentary nature of her memories.

Yüksel’s artistic approach in Grandma evokes Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation. Discussing slave archives, Hartman addresses the difficulty of reclaiming enslaved women’s full humanity with conventional historical methods, as these lives were reduced to nameless fragments in official records (6). She thus proposes critical fabulation, a narrative method which blends historical facts with imaginative storytelling to explore what might have been or could have been, while trying to be careful not to impose modern interpretations that could risk romanticizing or further exploiting the suffering of Black enslaved women. On a personal level, Yüksel is also confronted with the unspeakability of the history of communities excluded from dominant cultural representation, and she attempts to resolve this contradiction through the narrative strategy of critical fabulation, blending reality with imagination. Yet, despite being recounted this way, Yüksel’s grandmother’s story, along with those of many other Turkish women—similarly to Black counter-historical projects—is threatened to remain an “insurgent, disruptive narrative that is marginalized and deflected before it can gain footing” (Hartman 13).

The consolidation of this photographic heritage is further hindered by the limited accessibility of the exhibition texts, which are available only in Dutch and Turkish. Although an English translation, with several missing sections, is available for visitors in a booklet, I found no indication of this within the museum. Furthermore, in light of Yüksel’s photo book of the same title, which was published alongside the exhibition but independently of the museum, I also found it surprising that the curators chose to present only a few sentences from the women’s rich stories included in the photo book and left most archival images without captions, rendering their contextualization challenging for visitors.

Likewise, the discursive framing of the exhibition material also provokes critical reflection in certain instances, especially when it comes to the agency and subjectivity of Turkish immigrant women. Firstly, the contextual claim in the exhibition introduction that “from the late 1960s onwards, the first women from Turkey came to the Netherlands to build a new life here” fails to acknowledge the Netherlands’ active role in recruiting immigrants to reconstruct the country following World War II and the limited agency many women had in their relocation. The exhibition itself underscores that many women had no real choice but to follow their husbands to the Netherlands: for example, Selvet Şükür moved to the country following an arranged marriage, while Zehra Özgül had little option but to follow her husband—who had left her and their seven children behind in Turkey—as she could no longer manage the household burden alone.

Similarly, while tracing shifts in terminology for migrants, the exhibition’s introductory timeline also fails to critically reflect on how power dynamics shape agency on both macro (interstate) and micro (personal, familial) level. By merely stating that migrant workers were called gastarbeiders (guest workers), buitenlanders (foreigners), “non-indigenous people,” etc.—without acknowledging that these terms all reflect the perspective of the host country exercising control over labour migration while reducing people to carriers of labour force or conceptualizing them primarily as outsiders—, the exhibition runs the risk of reinforcing prevailing narratives that obscure the structural inequalities shaping these histories, even though the museum’s original intention, admirably, was to offer an alternative perspective to prevailing narratives about migrants.

Nevertheless, in order for the archives of Turkish immigrant women and other historically marginalized groups to better contribute to shifting the boundaries between memorable and unmemorable lives, and to more effectively support the reframing of Dutch collective memory, national museums as representatives of dominant culture should provide as much space as possible for new perspectives while paying special attention to the conditions under which these voices are presented.

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Curated by Iris Bergman (Bertien van Manen), Frederiek Biemans (Prospektor) and Frits Gierstberg (NFM), the exhibition If Only You Knew: The First Generation of Women from Turkey in the Netherlands by Çiğdem Yüksel is on view at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam from 28 September 2024 through 25 May 2025.