A growing number of artists and public institutions have been navigating the complexities of the refugee crisis over the past few years, and now the private sector is pitching in to raise awareness—and funds for charities. At Art Basel this year there are several projects and gallery presentations that reflect the current humanitarian disaster engulfing Europe.
On Saturday, the Green Light project will take place within the artist Oscar Tuazon’s Zome Alloy installation on the Messeplatz. Launched by Olafur Eliasson and Vienna’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary space earlier this year, the ongoing initiative provides a safe creative space for refugees to create lamps using recycled materials, working alongside local people. Lamps will be available for a donation of SFr350. All proceeds will support the project’s partners, including Red Cross Vienna and Georg Danzer Haus.
In the main Galleries section, Galleri Nicolai Wallner has brought two paintings from E.B. Itso’s Shedding series (2015), for which the Danish artist travelled to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where boats full of refugees pour in from North Africa. When they arrive people often change out of their clothes, shedding a layer of themselves and their past lives. To create the works, Itso took these discarded garments, dipped them in an Yves Klein-bluish paint and printed them on paper. The works are framed with driftwood found on Lampedusa’s beaches. “They are beautiful visualisations of a harrowing subject,” says Rasmus Stenbakken, a director at the gallery.
The paintings are priced at €10,000 each and part of the money will be donated to charities working on Lampedusa. “We don’t make a profit,” Stenbakken says.
Works in Art Basel’s outdoor Parcours programme are also raising money for refugees. For Alfredo Jaar’s The Gift (2016), volunteers in and around the Münsterplatz are handing out cardboard boxes printed with a photograph of the section of beach in Turkey where the drowned body of toddler Alan Kurdi was found last September. The small boy’s image has been removed but the beach is still recognisable. The boxes come with instructions to open and refold them, turning them into donation boxes to collect money for the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, a charity dedicated to saving lives at sea.
The work draws on an editorial by Mario Calabresi, the then editor-in-chief of the Italian newspaper La Stampa, in which he justified publishing the haunting photograph of Alan Kurdi on the publication’s front page. Calabresi wrote that the image demands that we all “face what is happening on the beaches where we spent our vacations”, concluding: “This is the last chance for Europe’s leaders to live up to the challenge of history. And it is the chance for every one of us to take stock in the ultimate meaning of existence.”
The polished commercial setting of an art fair might seem an unlikely place to debate a subject as distressing as the refugee crisis, but a panel discussion on 16 June aims to provide a forum for exactly that. “Most collectors are highly aware [of the crisis], but they won’t necessarily look for that in the work they buy,” says Paul Hobson, the director of Modern Art Oxford, who will be speaking about cultural institutions’ response to migration. “But people who come to art fairs want to have interesting conversations beyond buying and selling art.”
Hobson says institutions have a responsibility to reflect contemporary issues in their programmes—without bending to market tastes and pressures. “By default, art is a lens through which we can engage in the contemporary world in all its complexities. I can’t think of anything more defining than this appalling crisis,” he says. Modern Art Oxford is developing an outreach programme largely aimed at refugees in the UK city, which will offer training to work with artists and present pieces at the gallery. “We can support integration and give people a sense of belonging,” he says.
Across Europe, museums have been at the vanguard of supporting refugees. In December, Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art launched the Multaqa (“meeting point”) project to train 19 Syrian and Iraqi refugees to conduct guided tours of the Pergamon Museum, Bode Museum and German Historical Museum in their native languages. The tours are free to refugees and each guide is paid €40, in line with their German counterparts.
The project has been a resounding success, with 4,000 Arabic-speakers visiting the Museum of Islamic Art between December and May, according to Razan Nassreddine, a director of the project who also will be on the panel about migration at Art Basel. Another eight guides are due to start training at the end of June.
Largely financed by the German government, the aim of the project is two-fold: to remind migrants of their own culture, and to learn about the heritage of their adopted home. “We have people from all backgrounds as guides: musicians, economists, lawyers, art restorers,” Nassreddine says. “Multaqa is the first step towards welcoming people to Berlin.”
Other museums have been working directly with migrants long before the current crisis—the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, began its Travelling with Art project in 2006. In April it received the International Council of Museums’ best practice award for the initiative, which offers art classes to refugee children, in partnership with the Danish Red Cross.
However, the focus of the project has changed in recent years, says its supervisor, Line Ali Chayder. In 2006, the majority of children entering Denmark were aged between eight and 12 and were seeking asylum with their families. Over the past two years there has been an explosion in the number of unaccompanied minors aged between 16 and 18.
“Engaging with art, immersing yourself in artistic methods and having the chance to meet peers of your own age in a safe environment is crucial for these young people,” Chayder says. “Since art is about what it means to be human, and our institutions are built on democratic and humanistic values, we have a responsibility to bring the outside world into the museum and discuss and reflect on what is—alongside climate change—the biggest challenge of our time.”
Institutions and artists around the world respond to the crisis Ruya Foundation, Baghdad
Creativity for Survival is one of the Ruya Foundation’s latest endeavours and will include a permanent workshop and exhibition space in Camp Shariya, in northern Iraq, which is home to 19,000 Yazidi people who were forced to flee when Isil attacked Sinjar in 2014. International artists including Francis Alÿs have been invited to participate in the project. One of the foundation’s long-term goals is to stage a major show of international contemporary art in Baghdad.
Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens
Last month in Athens, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei unveiled new works created during his time on the Greek island of Lesbos documenting the plight of refugees. Among other works, the exhibition at the Cycladic Museum of Art (until 30 October) features tear gas canisters used on refugees in the Idomeni camp juxtaposed with ancient Greek vessels used to collect tears from mourners. “I felt like I’d dropped into a deep, dark hole,” Ai says of his first visit to Lesbos. Ten percent of all the exhibition proceeds will go to charities helping refugees.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Museum of Modern Art’s director Glenn Lowry has been speaking out about the refugee crisis, recently guest editing a series of stories for CNN on the theme of migration. A number of films by the Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili that map the journey of eight illegal migrants as they travel through the Mediterranean is currently on show at the museum (until 28 August), while an exhibition focused on the architecture of shelters and refugee camps is due to open there on 1 October.
• Conversation: Cultural Institutions’ Response to Migration, moderated by András Szántó, Thursday 16 June, 10am, Auditorium, Hall 1