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23 May, 2016
Kajal Nisha Patel’s photographs have long been favourites of ours and of visitors to our exhibitions. There’s a richness to their colour and a vibrancy in their composition that people love, whether in the slyly provocative ‘Nagar Kitan’ (which Kajal previously called ‘No, this is England’) or ‘The Patriot’ or her shot of a pair of Union Jack socks on the feet of an unidentified model. They are also a wonderful reflection of their location, Leicester, which is one of the reasons why they were used to such winning effect both by BBC Radio Leicester and by the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, when 100 Images of Migration was being re-curated by the School in 2013–14. We’re immensely grateful to Kajal for allowing us to use so many of her images, but, weirdly, she’s almost as grateful to us: she feels that our use of her photos has allowed her to reach audiences and opened up prospects that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Whereas I think the strength of her photographs would break down most doors and that we’re ridiculously privileged to have been able to make such use of them.
Nagar Kitan, Leicester, 2011 (previously known as ‘No, this is England’). Leicester’s annual Sikh Vaisakhi parade normally attracts around 30,000 worshippers from all around the UK. © Kajal Nisha Patel
So it’s a bit of a surprise to find, on meeting her in the University of Leicester Union Diner, that she has fallen slightly out of love with photography. Currently the Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the University of Leicester, a position she holds until December 2016, she is looking to develop as an artist in ways that will take her beyond photography to something that is more inclusive and immersive. She worries about the reductive nature of photography: ‘When I’m taking a photograph of a person, there is always a third person present in the portraiture: the person who will eventually be looking at this photograph in an exhibition or an online display of my work.’ It’s the reason she has such nostalgia for found and vernacular photography, pictures that were always solely intended for the people being photographed and the person taking the photo. Any artistry such pieces had, she says, was completely accidental – and the better for that. Continuing this riff, and despite having brought her huge Canon with her to our meeting, Kajal wonders whether from now on her photographs will mostly be taken on her phone, to get back to this idea of vernacular art. To illustrate the point, she shows me a picture she took in the past few days of her father bending down to sweep up around the skirting board in the kitchen. It’s a spectacularly beautiful image – capturing the light and the humanity of a prosaic gesture in exactly the way that her other images do. Kajal, rather ruefully, agrees with me when I say so. ‘Yes, I can see what a good composition it is,’ she says, ‘but that had nothing to do with the reason I took it. I took it because I was moved to see my father – an Indian man of his generation – so comfortably involved in a domestic task that would traditionally be seen as a woman’s duty. That’s what I wanted to show.’
Dad, 2016 (Kajal’s father in the kitchen of his home in Leicester, taken on Kajal’s phone). © Kajal Nisha Patel
Domestic roles, the working lives of women, how women can become emancipated, physically and spiritually, the relationship between mother and daughter, these are Kajal’s preoccupations as she moves into her residency. We talk about the powerful message of the East African Asian migration to Leicester: how the dearth of job prospects for men arriving in the dying throes of Britain’s prowess as a manufacturing nation led to women performing a textile revolution, at the same time transforming the economic fortunes of the city and doing so, ironically, by overturning the standard domestic roles of men and women in their community.
Mum and Dad, 2016. © Kajal Nisha Patel
Kajal agrees but points out that it’s more complicated than that – that women and mothers continue to be oppressed on any number of levels and that, again ironically, for many Asian women becoming wives and mothers represented a kind of emancipation: their new status gave them a role and an arena in which to perform it that they wouldn’t have had if they’d continued to live with their families. Kajal wants to explore this further and to see how these roles led the Asian women of her mother’s generation to develop further life skills, some of them, by any definition, creative skills.
Former factory, Frog Island, 2010. © Kajal Nisha Patel
There’s a neat circularity in what she is trying to do at the moment, too. She says that the arts are not really valued in the Asian community, where knowledge is the highest source of wealth and work is the most potent currency. So she made work her focus, touring around factories to seek out the stories of workers (mostly women), gleefully documenting the story of the 1972 Mansfield Hosiery strike in nearby Loughborough, in which a predominantly Asian female workforce stood up against discrimination in the workplace. ‘Our very own Grunwick dispute, though with less media coverage,’ says Kajal, ‘But it made me feel so proud to find out about it.’ She’s currently producing five films about the strike, looking at the tensions or the balance between the working and the domestic lives of the participants.
Birds, Frog Island, 2010. © Kajal Nisha Patel
Out of work, art. There’s a ‘Yes, but … ’ there, because Kajal has problems with the art establishment: art galleries continue to be elite institutions, with obvious barriers, especially for Asian artists, and it’s still complicated getting BME art shown elsewhere. It’s why Kajal hopes to be working extensively in schools and the workplace, nurturing a sense of self-reliance that she hopes will be politically emancipating, too. There’s a political fire to everything she talks about – whether it’s the connection between climate change and migration, the link between migration and happiness (the key concern of David Bartram, her mentor for her residency), the subject of identity (as big an issue, Kajal maintains, for white British men as it is for British Asian women), the trade relationship between India and Britain. I get so taken up in the conversation that I fail to notice that we are having lunch in an otherwise deserted restaurant at 3pm, which in turn means that I end up missing my train back – something that Kajal seems to feel worse about than I do. As an artist, she works on a very tight budget, and any unexpected expense causes consternation. Though I too am concerned, I feel that I’ve more than got my money’s worth from the day. I’ve found out a lot more about a city that has been a very good friend to the Migration Museum Project, I’ve done so in the company of a photographer who has been one of our most generous supporters, and the chana massala and mattar paneer that made me late for my train were the tastiest I’d had in a long time. All of that more than makes up for the cost of an extra ticket.
There is a ‘Yes, but … ’ for me, too, but it’s not about the train fare. What I wanted to say to Kajal before I left was, yes, of course go ahead and do this work that so fires you and stokes your interests, and for which I know you’ll produce something really special. But there are a lot of people out there who love your photos for their effortless grace and power – so don’t forget to take the occasional photograph, too.
Kajal’s work can be viewed on her website, www.kajalpatel.com (currently under construction); the project for her work as Leverhulme Artist in Residence can be followed at www.kajalpatel.org, and her Twitter feed is .
15 May, 2016
A guest blog by Anthony Lester, distinguished friend of the Migration Museum Project, Liberal Democrat peer and author of a new book on the threat to our freedom.
Politicians are all too easily tempted to exploit racism in their pursuit of power. It is a dangerously divisive tactic that plays on religion, nationalism and xenophobia, as we see in the seething cauldron of British politics today.
In 1968, to its shame, Parliament surrendered to racism. The newly independent East African governments had introduced racist policies of ‘Africanisation’. They gave preference to their own citizens in trade and employment and required British Asians to leave. British Asians came to Britain in increasing numbers as British citizens with full British passports.
Two Conservative MPs, Duncan Sandys and Enoch Powell, campaigned to take away the right of these British Asians to settle in Britain. They exploited public prejudice against non-white immigration. The Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, gave in. He rushed an emergency Bill through all its Parliamentary stages in three frantic days and nights. British citizens who had not been born in the UK, or whose parents or grandparents had not been born here, were stripped of their right to safe haven in Britain. On its face, the Bill was not racially motivated. But its intention was racist and so was its effect.
Chaos at Nairobi airport, Kenya, 1968, with barriers closed against Kenyan Asians attempting to leave the country as the new UK legislation restricts entry.
Some 200 000 British Asians lost their right to enter and live in their country of citizenship. They were divided from their families in Britain, imprisoned if they tried to enter without Home Office permission, or shuttled across Europe, Africa and Asia, desperately seeking a new world.
Ministers misused their majority in Parliament to abridge the basic rights of a vulnerable group of fellow British citizens because of their colour and ethnic origins. It was a classic example of what J S Mill termed ‘the tyranny of the majority’. The British Asians had no means of seeking redress from British courts because the Westminster Parliament was all-powerful. Until the Human Rights Act came into force in 2000, British courts could not declare the 1968 Act incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. So test cases were taken to the European Commission of Human Rights, and I led the legal team.
Europe came to the rescue. The Commission rejected the government’s case. It decided that the 1968 Act was racially motivated and that it had subjected British Asians to inherently degrading treatment.
Roy Jenkins, who had replaced Callaghan at the Home Office, accepted the damning verdict, and the British Asians came and settled here. Many made their homes in Leicester. They, their children and grandchildren made, and continue to make, an outstanding contribution to that city and to our nation.
Despite this kind of advertisement, placed in the Ugandan Argos in 1972, thousands of Ugandan Asians came to settle in Leicester, a city whose fortunes they have helped to transform. ©Kajal Nisha Patel
What became known as the East African Asians’ case convinced me of the need for a British Bill of Rights protecting everyone against the misuse of power. Thirty years later the Human Rights Act was passed, which enabled our courts to give effective remedies, including declarations that Acts of Parliament were in breach of European Convention rights.
The Human Rights Act is now under threat and needs your support. I hope that my book – Five Ideas to Fight For – will encourage you to do so.
Anthony Lester is a human rights lawyer and a Liberal Democrat Peer and a frequent commentator on legal matters. His book Five Ideas to Fight For: How Our Freedom is Under Threat and Why it Matters is published by Oneworld Publications and is available now from Amazon and other booksellers.
5 May, 2016
Adam Woodhall visited the migrant camp in Calais in November 2015. In the conversations that followed (particularly one with the MMP’s Sue McAlpine, who is curating Call Me By My Name: Stories from Calais and beyond, shortly to open in Shoreditch, London), he realised that his personal interest in environmental issues, especially drought caused by climate change, was intimately linked to the stories of some of the people in the Calais camp.
So here I am, six months after my visit to Calais, happily tapping away on my laptop, in my comfy, warm, dry, safe, settled flat in London, looking through my double-glazed windows onto a calm residential scene. In Calais I had looked into the eyes of people whose journeys I could only dimly envisage. They’d travelled across continents, through war zones, leaving behind family, friends, treasured possessions, hopes and dreams. Here they were now, standing in a puddle, with only the clothes on their back and a dream of safety and a better life in the UK.
The migrant camp at Calais. ©Adam Woodall
What was it that kept them here, waiting for fate to finally smile on them? In conversations throughout the UK, whether it be in pubs, coffee shops, on Twitter or in the media, there are many views on this: they were there to ‘take our jobs’, to ‘exploit our benefits’ or, more benignly, to be re-united with family members who were already legally in the UK.
Whatever truth there may be in these views, it is only one part of the story of why these individuals find themselves in a cold, wet, miserable migrant camp in Western Europe. There is context, stretching back a decade or more, to the situation they find themselves in – and a significant factor in the narrative of the migrants is their own local environmental crisis. The story of these people goes way back to their birthplace. To a time when they too would look out of their window from their comfortable and dry home, feeling happy, safe and content.
For some of them the view they looked out upon would be very different from mine. In my mind’s eye, I see them looking out upon a rural landscape, in a wide Syrian valley. There are fields beyond their village, some with crops, some with animals grazing. The weather is hot, there are children playing and the elders are sitting out on shaded verandas.
This is 2006, and something is starting which will change their lives forever. What is starting is an extreme and long-term drought, which in some areas of Syria led to 75 per cent of households* suffering total crop failure. Imagine your local Asda, Sainsbury, Tesco and Morrison’s shutting down, leaving only the occasional corner shop open, and all employment opportunities drying up at the same time. Would you stick around? Or would you move to where there might be some food?
A chart showing the increased frequency of drought in the Mediterranean area (Hoerling, M, J Eischeid, J Perlwitz, X Quan, T Zhang, and P Pegion (2012) ‘On the Increased Frequency of Mediterranean Drought’ in J. Climate, 25, 2146–2161; first shown on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration website in 2011). Reds and oranges highlight lands around the Mediterranean that experienced significantly drier winters during 1971–2010 than the comparison period of 1902–2010.
For these people, the first step of this journey was having to admit to themselves that living in the place where they had grown up, as had generations before them, was no longer viable. So they moved to a Syrian city where food was more readily available. This unfortunately proved to be out of the frying pan of long-term drought and into the fire of a failing state, with threat multipliers – such as ISIS, the corrupt Assad regime, refugees from the Iraq conflict – all conspiring to light the touch paper of violent protest and then blowing up into a full-scale civil war.
An aerial view of the Za’atri refugee camp in Jordan, whose population was estimated at 83,000 in March 2015. Estimates for the population of the migrant camp in Calais are between 3,500 and 5,500 people.
So they move again, this time to Turkey, where they join millions of other Syrians in refugee camps. Here they hear of how things are better in Europe, so they decide to use some of their savings to make the risky Mediterranean crossing to Greece. Arriving in Greece, they find out that a family member is in the UK, and so they decide to trek across the continent to get there.
Ten years after the drought starts in Syria, here they are standing in a puddle in Calais, being looked at by me. My story ends with me getting back on a ferry and into my own bed before midnight. Their stories continue to be clear as the mud in that puddle.
* This figure is taken from Erian W, B Kaplan and O Babah (2010) Drought Vulnerability in the Arab Region: Special Case Study, Syria, p.15, para 3. Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction.
Adam Woodhall works with individuals and organisations to help them be environmentally, socially and financially sustainable. He is the author of the book Empower Change and is particularly focused on engaging people to change behaviours. Adam has also just launched a ‘sustainable’ comedy career. His Twitter feed is @adamwoodhall
28 March, 2016
We have long admired the work and the writing of Eithne Nightingale, whose blog Chirps from around the World is a wonderful record of her travels and her reflections on migration. Here, Eithne takes time off from her research into child migration (as part of a collaborative doctoral award between Queen Mary University of London and V&A Museum of Childhood) to give a brief account of her observations on migration in museums and galleries across the world.
Over the last two years I have been visiting public spaces that explore migration – museums, galleries and others – in Europe, Australasia and South America. Over that same period the present, unfolding migration crisis has invoked in me a sense of paralysis. What possible role can museums and galleries play that is anything other than peripheral in the present context? Where is the evidence that they can contribute to a more tolerant and just society?
It is clear that museums across the world differ in their decision on whose histories of migration to include. The Immigration Museum in Melbourne and the Migration Museum in Adelaide, for example, explore not only the story of immigration to Australia but also its devastating impact on the indigenous communities.
Images from the 1960s in the timeline in the Immigration Museum, Melbourne. The image on the right refers to a referendum in 1967, which voted overwhelmingly for Aboriginal people to be governed by federal legislation and included in the Australian Census.
An impressive number of museums in Italy are dedicated to the country’s long history of emigration. But 1973 was a turning point: in that year more people migrated to Italy than left it. In a laudable attempt to encourage the visitor to see parallels between past emigrants and more recent immigrants, Italian museums have included sections on post-1973 immigration. That raises other questions, though: wasn’t there immigration to Italy before 1973? And wouldn’t a more intertwined approach have been better?
The Museum of Copenhagen recently put on a temporary exhibition, Becoming a Copenhager. They were keen to adopt an inclusive approach and so included people who had migrated from the countryside to the city as well as those who had come from abroad. But, in reality, how parallel or different are these experiences?
What, too, about forced migration? The Museu de Imigração in São Paulo touches on slavery, a small museum in Farum outside Copenhagen on trafficked women, and the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney explores the convict experience.
Rooms where convicts slept in Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney.
The Migration Museum in Adelaide questions our use of language about who is a ‘settler’ and who is an ‘immigrant’ – a clever cartoon underlines this dilemma: an aborigine looks out at a ship carrying ‘illegal immigrants’.
Cartoon about Aborigines being horrified at the arrival of illegals, Migration Museum, Adelaide.
And what about the diversity of the immigration experience – of children, of women, of those who can afford to travel first class, or of those who risk their lives on an open boat or under the carriage of a truck? Or of those people (and who cannot be struck by such stories?) struggling to Europe in wheelchairs?
Timelines in museums intrigue me. I have followed them up stairs, on gallery floors, along perspective panels and on inter-actives. The Museu de Imigração, São Paolo refers to pre-history and the very first movements of people to South America. The timeline at the Cité National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris starts in 1831 and ends in 2007. The occupation of the museum for four months in 2010 to speed up the regularisation of people ‘sans-papiers’ following legislation in June of that year does not feature here.
Time line in Hotel de Immigrantes, Buenos Aires.
A sense of place can be very evocative – to stand under a shower in the same building from which people left Antwerp for the New World between 1873 and 1934; to wait on a railway station in Dudelange, Luxembourg, where Italians arrived to work in the steelworks at the end of the 19th century; to walk between the beds in the dormitories in the Museu de Imigração, São Paolo, where, from the end of the 19th century to well into the 20th century, migrants spent their first few days in Brazil. In Hotel de Immigrantes, Buenos Aires, you can still see the footmarks and the fingerprints of those who arrived from Europe, exhausted after weeks at sea. The FHXB Museum in an old factory in East Kreusberg in Berlin shows how migration to both West and East Berlin has shaped and regenerated the area around the museum.
Photo of original dormitories in the Hotel de Immigrantes, Buenos Aires, and (below) the museum’s recreated bedroom, using mirrors.
I’m fascinated by how museums recreate migration scenarios. In the German Emigration Centre, Bremerhaven, clothed mannequins, speaking different languages activated by a visitor card, stand beside a swaying liner on a recreated quay; the 1970s’ shopping complex, focusing on immigration to Germany, works less well. Perhaps such scenarios, verging on the theme park, are more acceptable the more distant they are in history? The closer they get to us the more difficult their recreation is. Would we, for example, recreate the ships currently crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe? Or is this an area that contemporary art – as in the work of Ai Weiwei – is perhaps more effective in modelling?
Quayside with emigrants waiting to board for the New World in the German Emigration Centre, Bremerhaven.
In several museums I took on the role of immigrant. At the Maritime Museum in Genoa I collected a passport and was quizzed by an interactive immigration officer before I embarked on the boat. When I got to Ellis Island, I was quizzed again – about money, health, political beliefs and disability. In Bremerhaven I followed in the steps of Mai Phuong from Vietnam who migrated to the former East Germany on a work voucher. In Melbourne I was put in the position of being an immigration officer and challenged into thinking what I would do when a man is aggressive towards a migrant on a bus.
Interactive of emigration officer in the port of Genoa in the Maritime Museum, Genoa.
Some objects have a particular power. Perhaps most powerful of all are the objects collected by Askavusa Collettivo (Barefoot Collective) in Lampedusa – weather-beaten wooden planks taken from abandoned boats, and migrants’ personal belongings displayed in an old fishing storage area without labels: “We can’t speak for the migrants.”
Migrants’ objects retrieved from the Wasteland in Lampedusa.
Letters too – such as personal pleas from Afghani refugees in one of the detention camps in Australia – can be powerful. Newspapers are useful in showing how debates over immigration have changed little over the decades. Personal stories can be very compelling, too, whether it is the story of the £10 English Pom or the child soldier to Australia, of the first migrant from Morocco to Antwerp or the child who was turned away from Ellis Island because of trachoma. Alongside the many stories of migrants who have been successful and contributed to the countries they have adopted there are difficult histories, too – like the stories of those at the Ballinstadt Emigration Museum in Hamburg who entered crime or who were turned away from the New World for pimping.
I have seen some impressive works of contemporary art – in Buenos Aires a piano that the owner brought from Europe creaks and groans, evoking the rough sea. In Mother Tongue by Zineb Sedira I watch the artist’s daughter, who speaks English, struggle to communicate with her grandmother, who speaks only Arabic.
Contemporary art, Migraciones en el Arte Contemporaneo in Buenos Aires.
I have been impressed by some genuine examples of co-production with refugee and migrant communities. Young refugees at Te Papa in New Zealand developed an exhibition based on their experiences in the Mixing Room – a flexible community space. At MAS in Antwerp, local volunteers or ‘trackers’ were given freedom to research stories about local communities. The research led to the exhibition 50 Years of Migration from Morocco and Turkey.
Exhibition co-curated with young refugees in the Mixing Room gallery in Te Papa Museum, Wellington, New Zealand.
The lessons I learnt from this whistle-stop tour are too many and too difficult to summarise within a blog such as this so I will attempt to do so, instead, in a future blog. Two things occur to me immediately, though. I believe that in any museum discussion or recreation of migration it is important to be clear about objectives and to measure progress and performance against these. And, further, we need to be brave, take risks, be creative, open up space for genuine dialogue with all sectors of the population, collaborate closely and equitably with migrant communities and, like the Askavusa Collettivo on Lampedusa, engage in whatever way we can with the present crisis.
For more information on the museums Eithne has visited, please visit her website.
And read more about her research into child migration as part of her Collaborative Doctoral Award between Queen Mary University of London and V&A Museum of Childhood here.
