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https://theamplificationproject.org/files/original/5fff81248fd8255aec4cd7d51b2d73c3.pdf
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ASYLUM IN ART
A PHOTO-NARRATIVE
EXHIBITION
�INTRODUCTION:
‘Asylum in Art’ is a photo-narrative exhibition taking the audience on an experiential tour of
lived reality.
What is the exhibition about?
Asylum in Art shines a lens on what life is like inside a British Immigration Removal Centre
(IRC) and beyond release into a community in Leeds, West Yorkshire.
What form does the exhibition take?
The exhibition is a photo-narrative of 11 photographs visualising the primary narrative
research of Maria De Angelis in photographs by Jeremy Abrahams. At its heart, photonarrative captures the tension between the institutional IRC (tasked with detaining and
deporting those without papers) and the gendered, cultural, human face of detainees hidden
away inside it. Using a photo-narrative method, the exhibition reflects key narratives across
detention experience: Amongst them - a lack of institutional legitimacy; its modern slavery
typology; its carceral practices, its netting of poor people of colour; counter-conduct and
belonging both within and beyond IRC walls. Due to women’s ongoing asylum claims,
women did not want to feature in their own photographs. Therefore, to protect participants,
all the actors are students or colleagues from Leeds Beckett University.
Who else is involved in the project?
Asylum in Art is a collaborative project with Critical Friends from City of Sanctuary, Refugee
Education Training Advice Service (RETAS); Toast-Love-Coffee café; Asmarina Voices; Hinsley
Hall; and Universities Chaplaincy in Leeds. And is based on the collective experience of 15
former detainees - truly remarkable women whose generous sharing of stories has made the
exhibition possible. Given that women cannot take photos inside these Centres, photographs
are artistic representations of key lived moments, as narrated by women, and negotiated
between women, critical friends, researcher, and photographer in the attempt to show the
experience the women wished to tell. As it takes the audience on an experiential tour into the
lived reality of detainees, it becomes an interactive process. Art as witness to trauma and
resistance encourages all of us to think through oppressive dynamics imposed on people by
the State and its institutions so we are better equipped to understand our place in asylum
practices and our capacity for social change.
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�Photo No 1: Phones
What does the image tell us? Although the UK’s immigration detention estate is one of the
largest in Western Europe (Silverman, Griffiths, & Walsh, 2020), what it is like to be inside an
Immigration Removal Centre (IRC), or how they operate, is a mystery to most. Designed for
immigration checks (an administrative as opposed to a criminal process), IRC’s are located far
from urban areas and operate as closed institutions, allowing family visits (to those who can
afford the travel) and entry to few but a select handful of charities, community groups, and
pre-approved researchers. The removal of phones compounds the isolation and secrecy of
these low-visibility spaces since any IRC replacement lacks both personal and legal contacts
as well as picture galleries. In the photo, mobile cameras are defiantly fixed on a UK Border
Agency site, as women provide this exhibition’s micro-lens on life inside the IRC.
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�Photo No 2: Coins
What does the image tell us? This photo-narrative concerns the amorality characterizing
asylum administration. In deciding who to detain and deport, the IRC reflects societal values
towards gender, race, nationality, socio-economic status, colonial and post-colonial
movement (Bosworth et al, 2018). Whilst in the prison context, there is frequent overrepresentation of society’s poor, within immigration detention those confined are any and
potentially all racialised migrant bodies, as illustrated by the Windrush generation (see
National Audit Office, 2018). Trinity (52) from Nigeria had this to say: ‘They treat you as
in times of slavery. They transport you, they control you, they take your freedom and your
labour’. Asylum seekers who work illegally are detained for deportation but allowed to work
whilst inside the IRC. Work is menial – serving food, washing dishes, sweeping floors - paid
well-below minimum wage and women’s skills set. BAME (Black & Asian minority ethnic)
women describe such practices as the typology of ‘modern slavery’.
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�Photo No 3: The bed
What does the image tell us? The practice of night-time removal is experienced as
psychological violence. As Kia (41) from Uganda explains ‘the guards come at night and a big
scream would wake you up. It’s like she’s not from my country, or in my family, but every time
people go missing you think is this human being safe? And you get upset, then scared’.
According to the charity Detention Action (2014), the IRC not only exacerbates existing mental
disorders but actively causes disintegration of mental health by detaining people without
criminal charge, for indeterminate periods (there is no upper statutory time-limit to how long
someone can be detained), and night-time deportation. According to the charity, the IRC is a
harmful and harming institution. Irrespective of whether the person had a mental illness
before entry, suddenly being locked up, cut off from friends, family, and a whole life, can have
unpredictable and serious mental health effects on anyone.
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�Photo No 4: Chapel
What does the image tell us? A significant strength of photo-narrative is that it situates
detainees as primary experts in the detention regime. This brings into focus the reality that
IRCs are more than just human warehouses and their inhabitants possess autonomy and
agency. As this photo-narrative shows, in the struggle for survival, women’s ingenuity and
creativity interrupts (albeit temporarily) the smooth workings of State power and control over
people without rights of citizenship or belonging. When it comes to challenging institutional
restrictions on women’s free association: ‘they [the guards] said I wasn’t going to be attending
chapel anymore because in chapel we had ladies from other wings and when we had made
friends - that’s where we planned the hunger strike’ (Benyu (35) from Zimbabwe - 31 days on
hunger strike. The hunger strike not only disrupts the smooth running of the IRC but actively
lowers its performance rating viz-a-viz contractual delivery of care.
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�Photo No 5: Radiator Food
What does the image tell us? When lives are ruled by external immigration forces, some
choices over what to eat, when to eat it, and who with, afford women a rare moment of
autonomy and asylum agency. In the photograph, women’s dismantling of supplied food
(saved from the canteen and bought from the IRC shop) and their rebuilding of ingredients
inside an empty plastic pot and cooked on the radiator, restores purpose and meaning to an
otherwise bare life. Women typically describe making food for one another following an
official interview or bad news from home. Beyond this, Wema’s attempt at recreating a
homely dish nourishes her gendered and cultural identity as a migrant homemaker
(Mankekar, 2005), as distinct to her administrative embodiment as a deportable body. Wema
(32) from Malawi.
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�Photo No 6: Hunger Strike
What does the image tell us? Look carefully at the photograph to spot the two empty chairs
and untouched plates of food in the centre of the table. The duty of care imposed by the
Detention Services Order (Home Office, 03/2017), makes food refusal inside the IRC a political
(as opposed to a private) matter. Once the refugee sector, the media, and politicians take up
a hunger story, political invisibility and institutional secrecy are temporarily lifted. Therefore,
the hunger strike is women’s most powerful form of protest for change. In the photograph,
women also display division and apprehension reflecting its costly challenge to their own
physical health and mental well-being (Shaw, 2016).
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�Photo No 7: Wrap
What does the image tell us? Looking at Centre routines and practices under the micro-lens
of lived experience raises the fragility of State exclusion, even when imposed on a
heterogenous collection of non-citizens with diverse ethnic and religious identities. Joli (31) –
a Christian from Namibia - recalls languishing in her room until a Kenyan detainee and
professed Muslim showed her where to eat and how to use the computer room. Kia (41) – an
Anglican from Uganda – describes arriving with nothing bar the clothes she is arrested in, to
be given a wrap by a Russian Orthodox Christian. The wrap meant so much to Kia, that she
could not bring herself to throw it in the Centre detention cupboard (where many women
discard items redolent of their captivity). Inside the walls of the IRC and across such a diverse
social group, such small kindness magnifies an administrative indifference for women’s ethical
care and social belonging.
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�Photo No 8: Empty Bed
What does the image tell us? This photo-narrative provides a qualitative understanding of an
asylum seeker, being taken into detention because something is not quite right in terms of
paperwork or legal status. It speaks to the immorality of offering sanctuary in a setting that is
carceral in nature. The fact it provides facilities like a gym, hair salon, or computer room does
not detract from being imprisoned against their wishes. As Trinity (52) from Nigeria remarks,
this only constructs a ‘glorified’ prison environment. Beyond this, it queries the very legitimacy
of these institutions. As Kia (41) from Uganda explains: ‘there was one lady in with us, classed
a foreign national, who killed her husband and her child and had a history of fighting the
guards. She said the toughest place they brought her was the IRC [laughs]. How can this be
right when it’s not a prison and we are not criminal?’
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�Photo No 9: Rebuilding Lives
What does the image tell us? Rebuilding lives and feeling productive is a struggle when in
limbo – unable to plan or work whilst awaiting an immigration decision on the right to remain
in the country (Turnbull, 2015). As Linda (42) from Zimbabwe says ‘I’m not doing anything
because I’m not allowed to do anything. Staff from the Refugee Council told me you are
allowed to volunteer, and I said really? I was so surprised at this. I met the co-ordinators of
the different projects I could volunteer for, and when I started volunteering, it was like I’m a
human being again. I loved it so much. I told Rose ‘volunteering has been my resurrection’
and she took it for her slogan. I have a slogan on a website. Who would have imagined that!
I was given another chance in life’.
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�Photo No 10: Belonging
What does the image tell us? A truer measure of belonging in and to a community is ‘active
mixing’ outside institutionally imposed time and space (Ager and Strang, 2004), where how
and who you mix with is dictated by the institution and its rules. This is so strongly embodied
by Linda (42) from Zimbabwe that her post-release actions can be read as reversing the
exclusionary table onto the State. As Linda explains, each year asylum seekers from her church
‘cook a proper Christmas dinner for British citizens’ and support them with ‘their social
problems’ (alcohol, drugs, loneliness), ‘so they get a happy day. Sometimes I think society
needs to hear this and not just what the media tells them about us’.
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�Photo No 11: Asmarina Voices Choir
What does the image tell us? There is much to be learnt about detention from within and
without its walls. Wema (32) from Malawi explains how forming a choir inside detention is a
transgressive challenge to restrictions placed on women’s free association. ‘Every twelve
midnight, we’d go into our friend’s room because she was a pastor. Staff would knock to say
you are making noise. We would say we are not making noise - you are. We can hear your
footsteps in the corridor and your bunch of keys rattling. We are praying. But [laughs heartily]
we are Pentecostal and when we sing it’s very noisy…Guards weren’t happy but they allowed
it. They just said we were stubborn people’. On release, Sita (25) from Ivory Coast describes
going with her friend to check out her local community choir: ‘We sang for international
woman day, yeah, all the choir, roughly 15-20 persons. We sing about the importance of
freedom and why people need freedom. And love and hope! And, yeah, so it’s kind of the
freedom of acceptance and belonging - that kind, rather than political freedom, yeah’.
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�A CLOSING COMMENT ON PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT:
There is a steadily growing body of material-culture and craft-art emerging from inside these
Centres. However, when contrasted to the quantitative data produced on immigration
(outlining trends and statistics), the visualisation of lived narratives is rare. The exhibition’s use
of photo-narrative seeks to advance the innovative trend for a more qualitative and human
understanding of what life is like without rights of citizenship. Of course, the 11 photonarratives cannot fully or definitively express what individual life is like inside one of the six
IRCs in England, or post-release into a community. Rather, each photo-narrative is designed
to capture a key moment of emotion, protest, and belonging – open it out to experience by
the visitor – and prompt new public engagement with the UK’s system of asylum
administration. The fifteen women who embody this exhibition were fuelled by hope for a
better legal-policy-community reception for new arrivals. In this spirit of public engagement,
participants and critical friends invite us to anchor this photo-narrative exhibition into our
respective education, training, research, artistic and community initiatives.
Project Lead, researcher & author: Maria De Angelis (Leeds Beckett
University).
Exhibition photographs: Jeremy Abrahams (www.jeremyabrahams.co.uk )
Public engagement photograph: Maria De Angelis
Photo-narrative: a composite of shared experience by 15 female former
detainees in search of asylum in Leeds, West Yorkshir e.
Project funders: Centre for Applied Social Research (CeASR) – Leeds
Beckett University.
Exhibition generously hosted by Leeds Church Institute: 12 -16 October
2020.
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�References:
Ager, A. and Strang, A. (2004) ‘The experience of integration: a qualitative study of
refugee integration in the local communities of Pollockshaws and Islington’,
https://lemosandcrane.co.uk/resources/Home%20Office%20%20The%20Experience%20of%20Integration.pdf [accessed 04.12.2020].
Bosworth, M., Parmar, A., and Vazquez, Y. (eds.) (2018) Race, Criminal Justice and Immigration
Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging, Oxford: OUP.
De Angelis, M (2020) ‘Female asylum seekers: A critical attitude on UK IRCs’:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-policy-andsociety/issue/97B423E5360B59E7E7CB94DC10596C91 [accessed 04.12.2020].
Detention Action (ed.) (2014) ‘The state of detention: Immigration detention in the UK in
2014’, https://detentionaction.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/The-state-ofdetention.pdf [accessed 04.12.2020].
Home Office (03/2017) ‘Detention services order’,
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_da
ta/file/892072/DSO_03_2017-management-of-detainees-refusing-food-_fluid.pdf [accessed
04.12.2020].
Mankekar, P. (2005) ‘“India Shopping”: Indian grocery stores and transnational configurations
of belonging’, in J. L. Watson and M. L. Caldwell (eds.), The Cultural Politics of Food and
Eating: A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 197–214.
National Audit Office (2018) ‘Handling of the Windrush situation’,
https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Handling-of-the-Windrush-situation1.pdf [accessed 04.12.2020].
Shaw, S. (2016) Review into the Welfare in Detention of Vulnerable People, London, UK:
HMSO.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_da
ta/file/490782/52532_Shaw_Review_Accessible.pdf [accessed 04.12.2020].
Silverman, S. J. and Griffiths, M. E. B. and Walsh, P. W. (2020) Immigration Detention in the UK,
Migration Observatory Briefing, Compas: University of Oxford:
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/immigration-detention-in-the-uk/
[accessed 04.12.2020].
Turnbull, S. (2015) ‘Stuck in the middle: waiting and uncertainty in immigration detention’,
Time and Society, 25, 1, 61–79.
15
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Asylum in Art: A Photo-Narrative Exhibition by Maria De Angelis and Jeremy Abrahams (UK)
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Maria De Angelis: Leeds Beckett University in partnership with Jeremy Abrahams: Photographer
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
This exhibition is funded by the Centre for Applied Social Research (CeASR), Leeds Beckett University
Description
An account of the resource
‘Asylum in Art’ is a photo-narrative exhibition taking the audience on an experiential tour of lived reality. Asylum in Art shines a lens on what life is like inside a British Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) and beyond release into a community in Leeds, West Yorkshire. <br /><br />The exhibition is a photo-narrative of 11 photographs visualising the primary narrative research of Maria De Angelis in photographs by Jeremy Abrahams. At its heart, photo-narrative captures the tension between the institutional IRC (tasked with detaining and deporting those without papers) and the gendered, cultural, human face of detainees hidden away inside it. Using a photo-narrative method, the exhibition reflects key narratives across detention experience: Amongst them - a lack of institutional legitimacy; its modern slavery typology; its carceral practices, its netting of poor people of colour; counter-conduct and belonging both within and beyond IRC walls. Due to women’s ongoing asylum claims, women did not want to feature in their own photographs. Therefore, to protect participants, all the actors are students or colleagues from Leeds Beckett University. <br /><br />Asylum in Art is a collaborative project with Critical Friends from City of Sanctuary; Refugee Education Training Advice Service (RETAS); Toast-Love-Coffee café; Asmarina Voices; Hinsley Hall; and Universities Chaplaincy in Leeds. It is based on the collective experience of 15 former detainees - truly remarkable women whose generous sharing of stories has made the exhibition possible. Given that women cannot take photos inside these Centres, photographs are artistic representations of key lived moments, as narrated by women, and negotiated between women, critical friends, researcher, and photographer in the attempt to show the experience the women wished to tell. As it takes the audience on an experiential tour into the lived reality of detainees, it becomes an interactive process. Art as witness to trauma and resistance encourages all of us to think through oppressive dynamics imposed on people by the State and its institutions so we are better equipped to understand <em>our</em> place in asylum practices and <em>our</em> capacity for social change.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
October 2020
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Leeds, UK. The bricks and mortar exhibition was hosted by the Leeds Church Institute, Leeds, between 12-16 October 2020
Format
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PDF. Original format = 30 inches x 30 inches
Language
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English
Rights
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©2020 Maria De Angelis & Jeremy Abrahams. All rights reserved
Asylum-seeker
Immigration Removal Centres
Lived experience
Photo-Narrative
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