A multimedia exhibition by Kiana Hayeri and Mélissa Cornet
Sarajevo City Hall | June 30 – July 14, 2025
Presented by WARM Festival 2025
No Woman’s Land is a multimedia exhibition by Kiana Hayeri and Mélissa Cornet, presented at Sarajevo City Hall from June 30 to July 14, 2025, as part of the WARM Festival. After becoming laureates of the Carmignac Photojournalism Award in 2024, Cornet and Hayeri traveled across seven provinces over ten weeks, interviewing over 100 Afghan women and girls about how their lives have transformed under these harsh restrictions. Over the course of six months, they returned again and again to document the realities faced by women and girls under Taliban rule – realities that, according to Amnesty International, may amount to a crime against humanity of gender-based persecution.
They met with more than a hundred women and girls: students banned from attending school, mothers forced to watch history repeat itself for their daughters, women journalists and activists who continue to raise their voices despite the risks. They listened to stories of resistance, exhaustion, and the quiet terror of erasure. What emerged is a portrait of a society where women have been systematically pushed out of public life, banned from education, employment, freedom of movement, and even from accessing parks, public baths, or beauty salons.
In late August 2024, the Taliban regime enacted a new law requiring women to cover their faces and forbidding them from being heard in public spaces – no singing, no reading aloud, no speaking up. The result, as one women’s rights activist explained before leaving the country, is not only political repression, but a profound spiritual collapse: “We have forgotten joy, we don’t know from where any can be found. I’ve lost all motivation. I cry alone, hidden. It’s as if someone has locked me in a room and won’t let me outside. Even food has no taste.”
The exhibition responds to this reality through a spatial narrative that moves between three symbolic realms. The outer space, dominated by men, is where women are forced into silence, looking out from behind metaphorical windows. The inner space is a shrinking sanctuary, a private domain where traces of hope and imagination persist. And between these two lies a fragile, often invisible, in-between: a liminal zone held open by the work of journalists, doctors, and activists who continue to resist, document, and care.
Presented for the first time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and installed in Sarajevo’s iconic City Hall, a space marked by both destruction and renewal, the exhibition invites reflection on what it means to be visible, to have a voice, and to hold on to dignity in the face of erasure.
Curated and designed by Lejla Hodžić.
