When home is the mouth of a shark

There are cards in four colours at the entrance to the exhibition and each colour represents a specific kind of refugee.

Pick a colour and you will be taken through a first-person account of that refugee’s journey, told through six interactive installations — or ‘rooms’ — representing the movement from home to conflict and into asylum.

Kalyani Nedungadi, a creative consultant at Migration & Asylum Project (M.A.P), India’s first and only refugee law centre, explains that this feature of the exhibition starts when you choose to pick up a card.A refugee’s trajectory, however, is not one that is chosen.

Titled Passage to Asylum: The Journey of a Million Refugees, the audio-guided exhibition, which opened at Delhi’s India International Centre on January 10, sets apart the asylum seeker’s experience from that of an economic migrant.

“No one leaves home unless/ home is the mouth of a shark” goes the opening line of the poem ‘Home’ by Warsan Shire. Nedungadi quotes this to explain the thinking behind the show. She conceptualised the exhibition and designed it with consultant and architect Maya Gupta.

We are sitting in the room that will represent the ‘Asylum Tribunal’ — a space which determines whether a refugee goes on to a future home, or is deported and ends up on an indeterminate wait.

Passage to Asylum immerses visitors in the refugee experience through its six interactive installations/ ‘rooms’.

Starting with their former home, refugees are thrust into conflict situations, from which they must make an escape. So the first installation is conceptualised as a maze, which takes up most of the exhibition space.

Gupta describes how each of the rooms makes a universal experience physical — for instance, the state of limbo experienced by asylum seekers is brought out by the ‘Deportation Corridor’, where visitors are forced into waiting if turned down by the tribunal.

Feelings associated with displacement may be universal, but the refugee experience is marked by an absence of choice.

More than 65 million people are displaced globally, of whom a third are refugees.

Founded in 2013, M.A.P provides legal aid to forced migrants and refugees. During a two-year study at the University of York on asylum law in different countries, members in M.A.P realised that engagement with lawyers formed a significant part of the memories and narratives of refugees.

M.A.P founder Roshni Shanker says the project used digital stories as a form of reporting the refugees’ experience — both positive and negative — with legal systems.

While compiling these stories, Nedungadi — who has a degree in Studio Art and History — came up with the idea for an exhibition. “We asked her to run with it,” says Shanker.

Nedungadi drew inspiration for the ‘rooms’ from both refugee accounts and the works of artists such as Cornelia Parker, Ibrahim Mahama, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and El Anatsui — all of whom engage with the themes of chaos, upheaval, and art as a space.

As digital stories may contain sensitive or identifying information, refugee narratives from around the world were collated by M.A.P lawyers for the exhibition. Some of the stories, of course, feature lawyers, since scouting for legal aid forms a significant part of the refugee experience.

Some accounts moved Nedungadi — like the one where the refugees were offered biscuits by a legal counsellor, and their regard, in general, for lawyers as the people who listened to their stories.

The exhibition’s ‘Alien Country’ installation embodies the refugee’s sense of isolation.

Conceding that the entire experience of the exhibition can be disturbing for many, Nedungadi says, “We cannot pretend that it isn’t uncomfortable.” The show therefore carries disclaimers for visitors and advises caution.

As trying as the experience may be, every step in the refugee’s journey is fuelled by hope.

Theirs is a story that both M.A.P and Nedungadi believe deserves to be shared.

“And how better to tell a story,” says the artist, “than to put people in it?”

Passage of Asylum: the Journey of a Million Refugees is on at the India International Centre till January 15.

Chitra Kalyani is a Delhi-based freelance writer covering arts and culture

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