Monika Bulaj’s discovery that her grandmother’s Polish town was once home to a thriving Jewish community that perished in the Holocaust set her on a 30-year journey documenting religious persecution.
Though Monika Bulaj grew up in Communist Poland, she was nonetheless a devoutly Catholic child who studied mystics and dreamed of a life as a cloistered nun. But her teenage discovery that her grandmother’s town was once home to thousands of Jews who perished in the Holocaust set her on a different path: a 30-year journey documenting persecuted religious minorities around the world.
Monika Bulaj Behind The Great Game. Central and Western Asia Project. ESSAY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT What lies behind the conflicts and power struggles vying for control of the oil resources of We…
In the work that I did in this Region (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iran) I’ve tried to go beyond the facile geopolitical characterizations of this region and its inhabitants and bring to the light its invisible spaces: spaces that resist the political monochromes, populist rhetoric and imported understandings of radical Islam. There is another, hidden world here, ignored by the media: that of the Sufi, despised by the Taliban; that of Islamised shamanisms and pre-Islamic traditions; that of the various nomadic tribes and other religious minorities, such as the animists, whose sacred places have long been seen as a powerful threat to the dominance of Taliban Wahabite ideology.
I’m trying to bring to the fore also the condition of women: their struggles with depression and suicide, with the impositions of morality, their aspirations, their sexuality.
Earlier this month The Aftermath Project announced the winners of their two $20,000 grants for 2010, as well as the finalists. Polish-born, Italy-based photographer Monika Bulaj won for her project “Afghanistan: Not Only The War,”
