Shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards | Patrick Wack
Patrick Wack's latest project in Xinjiang, The Night Is Thick, is shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards.
The Turkic minorities of the Chinese northwestern province of Xinjiang have been engulfed in a policy of persecution and reeducation in camps. In 2019, Amnesty International estimates that up to 1 million Uyghurs and Chinese citizens belonging to other Muslim minorities are imprisoned with no trial in so-called vocational training centres in order to turn inmates into loyal supporters of Xi Jinping and to make them renounce their Muslim faith. As this grim domestic cultural cleansing is happening in the face of international and Muslim political apathy, the region has also seen an unprecedented boom in tourism. The Night Is Thick project - for which I travelled twice to the region in 2019 - is an attempt at representing the twofold dystopia that Xinjiang has become, where folklore tourism and Chinese visitors are totally oblivious to the dark fate of local Muslims.
