Building 3, Room 3.191, ECU, 2 Bradford St, Mount Lawley
Curated by Marziya Mohammedali
Exhibition closes 14th March 2015
First Impressions by Elizabeth Bills
I headed down to see RE-fugue interested in seeing how Marziya was going to tackle the controversial political issue of Asylum seekers. I had arrived early to the symposium event “Activism and the Asylum Seeker Narrative” put on as part of the exhibition. Walking in the first thing you notice is a massive khaki green tent; prominent local activist Victoria Martin-Iverson explained that it’s a replica of the tents that house men on Manus Island.
Footage was projected onto the inside of the tent, almost pushing you to ‘walk in their shoes’ and sit where ‘they’ sit, inside I watched footage of protests, freedom marches, of two men who drank washing detergent being attended to by the guards, all shot from mobile phones from inside the detention centre. It was hard to keep listening, the previously distant issue of asylum seekers was unnervingly close. I wanted to take the earphones off and not hear grown men weep: ‘They want us to go away. They want us to die’.
What goes on in the world, the lives of asylum seekers that I see on the news are impossibly hard to relate to. Wandering around the rest of the exhibition there are more stories: letters by children in detention, tennis balls that asylum seekers have scribbled their identification numbers and names onto and then flung over the fence from inside, the voices of men documenting their lives on their mobile phones; stories that connected emotions and feelings to previously incomprehensible events like seeking asylum. In making these connections Marziya’s exhibition is a very strong argument for why activism and art should overlap:
Artists can make it easier for us to understand what is happening in the world by telling stories “Stories about what it’s like to lose your home, your land, your job, your dignity, your past and your future to an invisible force. To someone or something you can’t see. We need stories about what it is like to hate and feel despair, anger, and alienation from a world that has gone insane” (Denzin 2002) We need informative exhibitions that make these feelings visible, or stories that connect these emotions to wild utopian dreams of freedom and peace.
Denzin, N 2002, ‘The War on Culture, the War on Truth’ Critical Methodologies May 2004 4: 137-142.
Youtube Video published by GreenLeftTv,
Interview by Zebedee Parkes
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