Suyay: the missing, the waiting, the grieving (7-25 November 2018).
A powerful new exhibition at the Centre de la Photographie Genève, explores what it means to long for, to search for, and to live with, a missing mother, father, sister or brother.

Suyay means "to wait" in Quechan and this was the starting point for award-winning artist Laia Abril who worked with families of missing people in Peru.

Thousands of people in Peru are in limbo, waiting for news of their missing loved ones. They are suspended between life and death: not able to mourn or move forward. For these families, absence is a suffocating presence. Twenty or thirty years may have passed without them being able to breathe.

Almost 20,000 families are missing their relatives in Peru, joining the hundreds of thousands of people missing around the world. Whether this is due to conflict, or migration, or natural disaster, the story of each missing person is a story of uncertainty and searching, for those left behind.

The exhibition runs from 7 – 25th November at the Centre de la Photographie Geneve, in partnership with the ICRC. Searching for answers is fundamental. For over 100 years the ICRC has supported the right of families to know. Finding out the fate of missing people, today or in ten years' time, is a humanitarian act and a legal right. 

Text provided by the Centre de la photographie Genève.