Archives inspire asylum art

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Tags: art, discovery, human rights, library, summer-2011, UQ Art Museum

A powerful series of UQ art exhibitions provided a rare opportunity earlier this year to discover the human face behind the asylum seeker debate.

Waiting for Asylum, Collaborative Witness, and John Young: Safety Zone were the result of a collaboration between the UQ Art Museum, the UQ Library and researchers in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History, and opened to coincide with Refugee Week in June.

The exhibitions were partly inspired by research Professor Gillian Whitlock is undertaking with asylum seeker archives held within UQ’s Fryer Library.

Using photographs sourced from Fryer, artists Ross Gibson and Carl Warner produced a specially commissioned work entitled “protection”, which comprises a grid of 60 enlarged colour photographs. Bands of blackboard paint were dragged across the images to represent the loss of identity experienced by asylum seekers.

“Many of these photographs are anonymous and yet they provide extraordinary insights into the Nauru detention centre as they were photographed by the asylum seekers themselves,” co-curator Dr Prue Ahrens said.

Collaborative Witness included works produced in the past decade by prominent artists including Rosemary Laing and Guan Wei.

John Young: Safety Zone paid tribute to a group of foreigners who saved the lives of 300,000 Chinese citizens by sheltering them in the city’s international zone during the “Rape of Nanjing” in 1937.

By Michele Helmrich

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