The Sersal Project
A collage of photographs from the al-Murad Family Collection. © al-Murad Family Collection/
Sersal Project
by: Nathaniel Brunt, Interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer, and Aspiration 2030 Post-Doctoral Fellow
In April and May 2025, the Sersal Project launched with a series of powerful exhibitions and public activities marking the Yazidi New Year. The exhibitions in Erbil, Baʿshīqa, and Şingal featured a selection of previously undigitized and unexhibited photographs from the Penn Museum collection, depicting Yazidi cultural life in northern Iraq between 1927 and 1938. Taken by a team of American archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania Museum and the American Schools of Oriental Research during an expedition to the sites of Tepe Gawra and Tell Billa, the images present an extremely rare look at daily life in the Yazidi towns of Baʿshīqa and Şingal, where members of the archaeological team lived during their work.
In addition to these photographs from UPenn, the exhibitions also featured digitized family images from the collections of Yazidi community members living in the region today. Exhibition postcards distributed at the events included QR codes, allowing audiences to access and download their own collection of the archival images. As the digital photographs were downloaded and circulated, the images reached not only Yazidi community members in Iraq but also diaspora communities in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Armenia, Australia, the USA, and Canada.
The Sersal Project launch events were created in partnership with the University of Victoria Libraries, the Penn Museum, the Goethe-Institut Irak, and the Mirzo Music Foundation.
Yazdis gather in Baʿshīqa for new year’s celebrations featuring an exhibition of archival
photographs from the Sersal Project. © Sersal Project
The Sersal Project
The Sersal Project is a digital archival initiative dedicated to documenting, preserving, and sharing the visual cultural material of the Yazidi community. Founded by an international team of researchers, journalists, documentarians, architects, and designers, the project explores Yazidi mnemonic and visual culture while addressing the deep, lasting impact of the 2014 Yazidi genocide by the Islamic State. Beyond the immense human cost of these violent events, ISIS also destroyed Yazidi cultural and religious sites, erasing key spaces of intergenerational memory and displacing entire communities. Through its work, the Sersal Project seeks to respond to these issues by digitizing and disseminating historical materials to counteract attempts at cultural and mnemonic erasure.
Photographs featured in the Sersal Project’s in Baʿshīqa. The walls in the town still show
war damage from the liberation of the town from ISIS control. © Sersal Project
Among the founders of the Sersal Project is Nathaniel Brunt, an interdisciplinary scholar, documentary photographer, and UVic Libraries Aspiration 2030 postdoctoral fellow. His work focuses on digitally preserving and making accessible at-risk visual archives in conflict and post-conflict contexts around the world.