Migrations

About The Exhibition

MIGRATIONS is part of a multi-stranded project being developed by Belfast Exposed exploring different experiences of migration. The exhibition features major works on the subject of migration by well-known, contemporary artists and researchers; Anthony Haughey, Andrea Lange, Breda Beban, Penny Siopis and Terence Wright. A programme of screenings, discussions, talks and workshops considering specifically the 'visibility' of migrant identity and experience in Northern Ireland will run throughout September.

Between (2005) by Anthony Haughey
Migrations will feature a number of photographic portraits from Anthony Haughey's Between series. Between is a collaborative visual media project critically exploring negotiation of citizenship with residents in a Government of Ireland Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers, a former Butlins Holiday Camp, Co. Meath, Ireland. Haughey has been engaged in discussion with the current residents of Mosney regularly since October 2004. He is involved in various learning, teaching and support situations within this community and forming friendships and shared ideas through discussion with a group of mostly Nigerian asylum seekers.

I am learning about the everyday experience of negotiating citizenship from the point of view of individuals temporarily housed, stateless and awaiting a decision which will decide their fate, either licence to remain or deportation by the Department of Justice. Some families have lived in Mosney for over three years. Migrants are forced by circumstance to start out on a journey from home, clearly this journey and all its implications is not taken lightly. On arrival in the host country a complex and contested series of negotiations for citizenship and human rights begins.' Anthony Haughey

Refugee Talks (1998) by Andrea Lange
DV-Cam/DVD, 33 min
Refugee Talks consists of nine sequences, each featuring one or several persons performing a song. The protagonists are all refugees from different countries who lived in the same reception centre in Oslo during the winter of 1998. Each of them chose a song that was relevant to their own situation, and to the film they appear in. The work is shot at various locations within the reception centre in the common rooms or the family rooms. The title is taken from Bertolt Brecht's Fluchtlingsgesprache (written in exile 1940-41).

"Andrea Lange's works are involved with the human drama of community. For her, issues of displacement, assimilation and difference revolve around the central point of communication, inclusion and understanding. In a range of profound projects over a number of years she has investigated the situation of confrontation, incarceration, and commemoration to reveal the complexities inherent in the idea of placing the self inside the system of the other." Extract from catalogue text by Juliana Engberg, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)

Arrivals (2003) by Breda Beban
Photo series, 2003/2005, C-type prints
Breda Beban's work is about subjectivity and emotion occurring on the margins of big stories about politics, geography and love. Arrivals is a series of 8 sets of four photographs evoking in an uncomplicated and explicit way an experience of absence felt by those inhabiting the space between an unbroken desire (longing) and a broken sense of belonging. Each set of photographs depict; a picture of a bed(s), a picture of a window in bedroom, a picture of scene from a window and a close-up on some aspect of the same scene from the window. These photo-works are structured like narratives: they are literally a story of an escape, of a journey and of arrivals. The story is not told with the fluid realism of film, but through the repetitive frozen frames of photography. The photos are also intimate proofs, not just of arrivals, but also of departures - the blanking out of arrivals, the process of removal of all traces of someone who once was there.

"Breda Beban's work epitomises the distinct capacity of a work of art to describe life simply and without obvious elaboration, and to invest it with the profundity of human emotion"Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2004)

My Lovely Day (1997) by Penny Siopis
8mm colour film transferred to video and DVD, 21 minutes
My Lovely Day combines spliced sequences of 8mm home movies that the artist's mother shot in the 1950s and 1960s in South Africa with sound and visual text which tell an elemental story of migration, displacement and exile. The words (narrative) are those of Siopis' maternal grandmother telling her grandchildren, of her emotional and literal journeys between Europe, Greece and South Africa in the early part of last century. The moment of her telling is apartheid South Africa, as are the scenes captured on film, yet her references to social turmoil and catastrophe are those of an earlier time - the 1922 Greco-Turkish conflict in Smyrna, World War I and World War II. The sound combines traditional Greek music and song, with Siopis' mother's voice singing 'My Lovely Day', made as a 78 record in 1955. The uneven quality of the found footage - the jumps, sprocket tracks, scratches, light flares, camera movements, frail focus and intrusion of peripheral images - dramatises the quality of the film as artefact and in a way stands for the fragmentary nature of memory. My Lovely Day, as intensely autobiographical as it is an engagement with conditions of postcoloniality, was stimulated in part by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa. The TRC, which began in 1996, brought a hidden archive of personal memory into collective consciousness.

'My grandmother's story is of stoic, unsettled exile, but the film is also a much larger allegory of migration and displacement, and the effects of what we might now call globalisation.' - Penny Siopis

Migrations (2006) by Terence Wright
Today's media is characterised by attempts to search for more simplistic treatment of current affairs. Yet when we stop to think about how much of our knowledge of the world is derived from pictures, we find that there is also very little general understanding about how visual images communicate this information. Against this background, journalism as a profession has become 'promiscuous', disparate and diffuse; yet Western governments appear to be increasingly responsive to public opinion. It is becoming increasingly important not only to analyse the ability of visual images to create new discourses, but also necessary to examine the social and institutional constraints on their function.

Migrations is a multimedia presentation that considers some contemporary images of refugees and looks for patterns and common elements in their construction and usage. It identifies some historical archetypes that are used to portray the subject of forced migration and questions the role of the mass media in aiding the relief of humanitarian crises.