(gentle music)
- Hello, welcome to our section
on communicating migration in public spaces and galleries.
In the following examples,
I will introduce you to events, video artworks,
and installations that have attempted
to bring unusual perspectives to the public conversation on migration.
The examples are drawn from Australia and the United Kingdom
and the artists come from Turkey, Britain, and also Iran.
In the course of this section, please take a moment at each example
to think about the following themes and challenges
in making art to make a difference to public knowledge.
How important is the place where an artwork is shown
or where an art-based event is located?
Who is the intended audience?
What might they know in advance?
What might they bring to the interaction?
What will they think as they walk in?
These questions help us to consider
how an artwork might encourage an audience
or viewer to engage with its meaning or not.
Is it necessary or useful to offer beauty
or aesthetic pleasure or formal structure to capture attention?
What are the implications if a work is beautiful
but the subject matter is hard or disturbing?
Just think about these questions,
not just as you look at the following
examples, but as you look at all art,
particularly where the subject matter is confronting.
Our first example is a short film called "Remain.
" It was shot by an Iranian-Australian artist, Hoda Afshar,
with the help of a group of male migrants
who were being held indefinitely on the Pacific island of Manus
on behalf of the Australian state and its so-called Pacific Solution.
These men were intercepted traveling to
Australia by boat to claim asylum around 2013.
And there are more details of this in the resource pack.
The man in the picture is called Behrouz Bouchani.
He's a Kurdish man who, due to his work as a journalist,
had to escape Iran and seek sanctuary.
When incarcerated by the Australians on Manus,
he was very active in seeking ways to communicate his situation
and that of his fellow refugees to the outside world.
Hoda Afshar made the film secretly
without the knowledge of prison guards or the Australian border force.
And as you can see in this image,
the island is surrounded by beautiful waters,
and the island itself is indeed lush and tropical.
However, with no reason to be there except as prisoners
and with no freedom to shape one's future,
this beauty was strange and ironic.
Hoda herself describes it as a green hell.
Eventually, Bouchani escaped to New Zealand
with the help of Amnesty International.
He lives there now and continues to write.
Afshar's film has been screened in Australian art galleries
where the outside story and the whole
context for the film is now very well known.
But in this image, we are showing the film
to an audience in a small city in the east of the UK, Lincoln.
Many people in the audience, if not most people in the audience,
were not aware of the Australian so-called Pacific Solution.
So we incorporated many other
knowledge-sharing activities into the gallery.
There were poetry workshops, photography workshops,
there were performances, there was a sound artist's work
playing throughout the gallery and so on.
So the film was thoroughly contextualized.
In this photograph, we see people listening
to a professional Kurdish actor reading from
Bouchani's memoirs of his time in captivity on Manus.
The sound of his voice and the presence of a man
who had experienced displacement himself
interpreted a text in two languages in an emotionally powerful way,
helping the UK gallery visitors to come closer
to the heart and meaning of the film.
This shot, also from Remain, shows another detained
refugee, Neml, walking through the jungle in Manus.
In this sequence, he turns frequently to the camera operator, Hoda,
and talks about his experience seeking
asylum and what it's like to be on Manus.
The movement through the jungle effectively allows us,
the audience, to experience the place,
even if we can't experience the heat
and the hot damp of the weather there.
We also included still images that Afshar had taken
of the nine men who were artistic collaborators on the Remain project.
Afshar asked us to make the prints small, as you can see in this image,
so that viewers needed to get up close
and engage individually with the men's postures
and, of course, their faces and their bodies.
The exhibition also included a piece
of specially composed music by a Lincolnshire sound artist,
and you can see details of that also in your resources.
The different types of work created an immersive experience
for gallery visitors to help them understand
the feelings and terrors experienced by the men on the island.
My second and third examples are less positive.
Whilst the Remain show is in a gallery,
these were in public space outside.
It made a big difference to reception.
This strange golden bird is the centerpiece
of an artwork called Byzantium, commissioned in Liverpool in 2015.
The concept was that visitors to an art center
would feed in pre-prepared scraps of poetry and bits of language,
which would be fed through to the bird and its Raspberry Pi processor,
the ball in the middle of the bird there,
and the bird would then sing new poems
through a loudspeaker in the open street.
The bird was placed in a tree on the street
outside the gallery, so it was genuinely in public.
The very first night it was left in the street,
the bird was vandalized and left hanging, misshapen
from the branch, and the Raspberry Pi was stolen.
The local newspaper took up the story
and a businessman in the area paid for the bird to be remade.
However, the public space aspect had to be lost.
Is it possible then to expect art to be treated
with more respect than, say, an ordinary piece of
computing equipment left in the open overnight?
What should the artists and curators have considered about the place,
the people who frequented it, a busy urban night space,
and the nature of their work's intention?
A similar story relates to a work
by the Turkish artist, Bano Cenotoglu.
Her monumental work, "The List,"
makes visible the individual tragedies
of thousands of people who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean.
Their places of origin, names, if known, gender and age, if known,
and causes of death are pasted up on lists in public view.
Now, this is not a beautiful artwork,
but it is a very clear, formal intervention into public consciousness.
The plain black and white sheets of
paper are like very plain advertisements
or old-fashioned public information posters.
In the 2018 Liverpool Biennale,
"The List" was commissioned and pasted onto hoardings
outside a failed development on a road coming in towards the city.
It was torn down twice during the period of the Biennale.
Why might this have happened?
One answer was that racist elements of the public
did not want to know about migrants' lives or deaths,
so they tore it down as a gesture of contempt.
Was this to be expected?
Does an installation like "The List"
assume goodwill or a particular demographic
if it is to sit undisturbed and respected?
And of course, in this case, unlike the raspberry pie,
there was no financial advantage in vandalising the artwork.
Walking past the same hoarding two years later,
I noticed that scraps of "The List" were still there,
and the still-unfinished development was behind it.
There were also welcoming messages about refugees now added.
Had the mood in the city changed,
or are we looking at genuine public art,
which is dynamic, rough, unexpected, changeable, discordant?
I hope these examples have proved interesting for you.
Now, please take time to look further into the resources provided,
and also maybe consider public arts that you have seen
near your home, in your city, or wherever you live.
What kind of work has provoked discussion?
What kind of work has perhaps provoked anger or even vandalism?
How best to engage an audience in perspectives
which may be unfamiliar or unwelcome to them?
How much guidance and context does a member
of the public need to fully grasp a show
and a story that comes from experience very different from their own?
Thanks again for your attention.
(gentle music)