Sakina Teyna was born into a Kurdish Alevite family in the small town of Varto in Turkey. As a teenager she started singing with Turkish choirs and bands, but it wasn’t until she entered university that she became acquainted with Kurdish musical traditions and set out to defy cultural assimilation. In 1991 she joined the Mespotamian Cultural Centre in Istanbul, a proponent of Kurdish culture, as a vocalist. Like many other Kurdish musicians, she was forced to literally go underground to practise her music and soon she had to choose political activism over art. It wasn’t until Sakîna arrived to Austria as a political refugee in 2006 that she took to singing as a full-time pursuit again. The first fruit of her concentrated creative efforts were released in the form of her first solo album ROYE MI. Suret is the story of a photograph, of a face. A story that also whispers the silent tales of the faces hanging on the walls of almost every home in Kurdistan, or hidden away in the quiet pages of photo albums. The music on this CD is hauntingly beautiful, accompanied by strings, guitar and piano.