In Turkey, a long-held ban on veiling in state establishments was once lifted just a decade in the past. As a teen-ager, Çimen postponed her personal faculty plans to keep away from having to unveil. (Later, she earned an undergraduate level in business and finance, adopted by way of a graduate level in cultural research.) Within the airtight global of “Hafiz,” few photographs recognize the spectre of Westernization outright. One exception is a photo of illustrated clippings on a school room wall, with purple “X” marks caught underneath the ones that includes girls in insufficiently modest apparel.
For plenty of of Çimen’s topics, the hijab involves resemble any extraordinary faculty uniform, not more proscribing than a collared blouse or a plaid skirt. For others, even though, the garment suggests a brusque induction into the realities of maturity. During “Hafiz,” Çimen dramatizes the ladies’ trips from innocence to enjoy with the fanciful use of gatefold pages. Essentially the most haunting series displays a sacrificial animal photographed up shut, with raveled fur and a glassy eye, adopted by way of a shot of a bloodied stone. Within the guide, those photographs are hidden at the turn aspects of pages that painting an eight-year-old, Elif, on her first day of college. At the left, she has been photographed and not using a shawl, status in sparse brush sooner than an outside mural and taking a look about as shocked because the creature at the web page at the back of her. At the proper, remaining the second one gatefold unearths Elif in the similar spot, now veiled and, however for her patterned get dressed, unrecognizable. The beast has been killed, the comb has grown wild, and Elif strides out of the body along with her eyes solid down, sporting her Quran.
Elif, 8, on her first day of Quranic faculty in Rize, in 2018.
