21 Children

The Project

21 Children is a tribute to the displaced communities in the Kurdistan region. Alan Khaledi has spent the summer of 2019 visiting refugee camps across Kurdistan, along with other camps in the Middle East, snapping photos of refugee children, who in his eyes, have experienced “a thousand tales of horror and suffering,” but who seem to find “joy in the smallest things” like a conversation or a game of soccer.

The Artist

After coming across a deeply troubling video depicting the inhumane conditions of displaced persons in Europe, Alan Khaledi – an upcoming senior at Stanford University and an Erbil, Kurdistan native – was both disturbed and inspired to share the narratives of displaced persons (particularly children) across the Middle East and Europe through photographs.

The Goal

To raise awareness of the lives of internally displaced people and refugees, we helped create a webpage dedicated to Khaledi’s work and provided resources to learn more about the displacement and refugee crisis in the Kurdistan region.