Refugee Week 2024

 The number of refugees forcibly displaced from their homes in 2024 is estimated to be over 130 million, an increase of twenty-five percent from 2022. The refugee crisis is a perennial issue communicated into the Western consciousness via media outlets, harbouring the power to influence public and private perceptions. Images of overflowing dinghies and large travelling masses are often plastered onto front pages, disseminated with capitalised warning of the dangerous consequences of illegal immigration.

 For Refugee Week 2024, Caerbladon selected seven exceptional artist projects which capture the human cost of the global refugee crisis, and also the resilience of the individuals involved and determination to build a new life away from the violence, persecution and hardship that caused them to leave their homes in the first place. We cannot offer solutions, but hopefully by highlighting the humanitarian cost we can build empathy and awareness of the issues involved, and inspire governments and NGOs to collaborate around effective action to provide sanctuary and support in a way that respects human rights.

 Sam Ivin - Lingering Ghosts

What does it mean to be an asylum seeker in the UK? This was the starting point of Sam Ivin’s research, which began at a drop-in centre in Cardiff,  Wales and continued all over England.  It seeks to raise questions about how the UK’s migration system treats those who arrive in our country seeking safety.

The result is a book and accompanying exhibition made up of hand-scratched portraits, where the eyes have been erased: once arrived in the UK, these people find themselves in a state of limbo, having to await news of their application for asylum for months or even years. They become Lingering Ghosts, published by Italian company Fabrica.

Ivin’s modified portraits simply and powerfully give a view on an issue that is often under-reported: the plight of those waiting for asylum. Despite being represented without their eyes, these people do have an identity and we recognise them as fathers, mothers, sons and daughters – human beings, after all.

 Abbie Trayler-Smith -  Still Human Still Here

 Abbie Trayler-Smith has photographed men and women who have fled torture and persecution in troubled states including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Zimbabwe. They had hoped to find sanctuary in the UK but instead are enduring a new kind of torment - destitution. All of the individuals featured  have been refused asylum and are living in extreme poverty rather than return to their home countries, in most cases out of fear of what might await them upon their return. With just a handful of possessions they move from place to place, sleeping in phone boxes, on night buses or park benches. Many of those featured fled their homes leaving behind wealthy families and good jobs. One man was a TV presenter in DR Congo but was arrested after appearing in a programme that was critical of the government. Refused asylum seekers are not eligible for housing and benefits and they are not allowed to work. 

Still Human Still Here has been developed through a coalition of human rights organisations including Amnesty International and the Refugee Council, which is campaigning for an end to destitution for refused asylum seekers.

Lais Pontes - The Things We Leave Behind

 These images are from the series “The things we leave behind” documenting a research-based project that looks at migration. Using a collection of objects recently left behind by refugees in transition, artists Lais Pontes and Teresa Albor, are attempting to connect all of us, on a human level, with what it means to be forced to move to survive. By asking participants to choose something from the collection of found objects and carry it with them, the artists are asking the participants to connect with a single individual. And, indirectly, the artists are urging the participants to be more keenly aware of their own personal narratives, their own family history. These images focus on the objects, with participants as silent witnesses in the background. Through these images the viewer is invited to make their own connections.

Ada Trillo – Caravanas Del Diablo 

 In October 2018, I joined a caravan of over 4,000 migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador as they made their way to the US-Mexico border. Two years later, I joined another caravan organized by community leaders in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. 

For migrants who are too poor to pay a smuggler to get them across the border, a caravan becomes the only viable option that can provide at least a basic level of safety during their journey. As the caravans made their way through neighbouring countries, they rapidly grew in size as more and more people, fed up with their living circumstances, decided to join them. 
 
Their hope was that strength in numbers would protect them and possibly even persuade the US to open its doors. The opposite happened. Donald Trump declared a national emergency and sent troops to the US-Mexico border. Trump also threatened to cut humanitarian aid to Central America.
 
When I arrived in Tapachula, Mexico, I photographed parents, students, and children, including disabled people, who had left their home countries to save their lives. Many were fleeing extortion and death threats from gangs. All possessed the simple wish to live free of fear. A clever young woman from Honduras, who goes by the name Fer, disguised herself in men's clothing to avoid being raped. Along their journey, many people throughout Mexico showed compassion and solidarity with the caravan by giving food, shelter, and fresh clothes to those making the journey.
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While my photographs document the plight and resilience of refugees and migrants, I hope that my work goes further than educating or raising awareness to compelling others to take action in their community. It is necessary to expose the truth about migrants and the injustices they suffer. 
  
 — Ada Trillo, ​documentary photographer

Ai Weiwei

 Arguably the most famous Chinese artist living today, much of Ai Weiwei’s work exists in the space between art and activism, often blurring the boundaries between the two. Politically outspoken and an avid user of social media, Ai creates works rich with symbolism and metaphor that draw attention to social injustice. In recent years Ai has focused his practice on advocating for refugees’ human rights, documenting the experiences and conditions faced by millions of people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes. Speaking about the situation, Ai states: ‘There’s no refugee crisis, only a human crisis… In dealing with refugees we’ve lost our very basic values. In this time of uncertainty, we need more tolerance, compassion and trust for each other, since we are all one, otherwise humanity will face an even bigger crisis.’

Featuring a 60-metre-long boat crowded with hundreds of anonymous refugee figures, the work brings the monumental scale of the humanitarian crisis sharply into focus. The inflatable boat and figures are made from black rubber and fabricated in a Chinese factory that also manufactures the precarious vessels used by thousands of refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea.

Cesar Dezfuli - Passengers

On 1st August 2016, 118 people were rescued from a rubber boat drifting in the Mediterranean Sea, 20 nautical miles off the Libyan coast. One more of the hundreds of boats that have been rescued from this migratory route in the past years. Only in 2016, 181,436 migrants were rescued safe, while 4,576 lost their lives at sea.

But who is behind these numbers? What is the identity of the victims and survivors of this journey?

In an attempt to put names and faces to this reality, Cesar portrayed the 118 people who travelled on board this boat, minutes after their rescue. Their faces, their looks, the marks on their body... reflected the mood and physical state in which they were after a long journey that had already marked their lives forever.

During the last eight years the photographer worked to locate as many of them as possible,  today scattered throughout Europe, to understand and document their real identity, with the aim of showing that in those individuals there were latent identities, which only needed a peaceful context to flourish again. He has met 70 of them, located 105. They currently live in various cities in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium, Malta, Holland and Switzerland.

Passengers is ongoing, and the objective is to meet, photograph and interview the pending ‘passengers’, thus completing all the perspectives of those who were part of this journey, so that with all the information Cesar collected can get to spread with guarantees and precision the history of this boat and its ‘protagonists’.

 Omar Imam - Live, Love, Refugee

 In Live, Love, Refugee Omar Imam dissolves the recurrent representation of Syrian refugees by replacing numbers, reports, and statistics with hallucinations, fears, and dreams. In refugee camps across Lebanon, Omar collaborates with individuals through a process of catharsis, one he believes to be deeply healing. He asks them to recreate their dreams: dreams of escape, dreams of emasculation, and dreams of love and terror. Sparse and surrealistic, the resulting images evoke the deepest and darkest inner worlds of those persisting everyday with their roots stretching further from a home left behind. In turn, these self-composed photographs challenge projections of victimisation, offering entry into the expressive interior from which our humanity stems.

Omar Imam studied accounting and began making photographs and films in 2003, inventing his own brand of dark ironic personal work in his hometown of Damascus. He left the country in 2012. Publicly, he does not share the dramatic and sometimes horrifying details of his life because he disdains being known as a refugee/victim. Imam is aware of how refugees have been depicted over the past half century. He wants his work to be judged on its merits, not on what others might assume about his artistic intentions from his own dramatic narrative.