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Artist’s Statement

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I found that the video alone didn’t really show the lack of humanity that was given to refugees, so I also created these faceless ‘everyman’ characters to further show the point. I will stick them on the screen and project the video onto them.

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Bibliography

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Here is a video I made. I used a double-exposure technique to juxtapose the way that people from Sydney see refugees with the actual situations that they are in. I plan to project this video over some faceless figures that I have drawn to further show this

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This is an artwork by someone who went into a refugee detention centre. This tell-all expose comic-style artwork really explores the dehumanising aspects of detention centre life. Really eye-opening

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‘Kamaleshwaran Selladurai is a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka who spent over two years in Australian detention centres. During that time he taught himself to paint, having never attempted to make art before. Kamalesh was granted a permanent visa in 2011 and now lives and works in Western Sydney.‘

‘The Refugee Project; is a collection of artists who are concerned about the plight of refugees and the way that they are being responded to. The pictured artworks are by Kamaleshwaran Selladurai who is a refugee, himself. These beautiful works reflect on the ideas of escape from terror and the promise that lies before him. It seems to me that they might take cue from the biblical story of Noah’s Ark, which led people to a land where they could start over. Unfortunately, this starting-over is often denied to these people when we turn them away.

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‘And it takes courage not to condemn countless families to unimaginable suffering or perhaps horrific deaths because maybe, just maybe, one of them might want to murder someone someday.

Life isn’t perfectly safe. We’re all going to die eventually. Something is going to get us. Courage is about living with decency in the face of that reality. Courage is a choice. A daily, hourly choice. Terrorists offer an invitation to be terrorized, to lose perspective. It is up to each of us whether to accept that invitation.’

This article is about the fear that we feel towards refugees. It’s really interesting, comparing the openness that America had towards Jewish refugees in WWII, the story of America’s Superman, who was actually a refugee but is also seen as all American. It’s interesting then that they feel able to turn modern-day refugees away because a lot of them are Muslim. A lot of people are so scared of things like terrorism that they never stop to think that that is exactly what terrorists want. They want us to live in terror. But it is so important that we are BRAVE and let people in that need our help.

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Survivors of a boat that sank off the shores of Australia recount the stories of everyone and everything they lost. These people were forced to leave their countries - they were seen as lesser people in their own land. We have also turned them away. We have truly shown them that nobody wants them.

Souce: https://youtu.be/Krd4jtCyHhU

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Refugees being turned away - their side of the story. People in need of help and medication are turned away - pushed out into the sea. I understand that this video only tells one side of the story, but I think it is very telling. ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’, in my view, really hurt people.

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An old experiment that I did but forgot to upload (Oops). It focuses on the dehumanising of the aboriginal people through removing their faces and replacing them with Australian flowers - placing them in with Flora and Fauna instead of people. This mirrored what was done to the Aboriginal people when Australia was settled (invaded) by white people.

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Experiment #3

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Experiment #2 

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Experiment 1: Removing refugees faces - looking at taking away their humanit

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Notice the language used - ‘Stopped the BOATS’. It’s all in the name of dehumanising people who need real help. They  keep talking about the benefits to Australia, and the children that they have saved from dying at sea - forgetting all of the kids who die from terrible situations.

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An article about the humanity of refugees. In my artwork I wan’t to focus on the idea of headlessness that I explored in my poster. Headlessness is symbolic of taking away the humanity of the person and reducing them to an object. Who is more dehumanised than the refugee that must flee their country. Notice that the slogan ‘stop the boats’ talks only about the objects, not the people that are in it.

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Adad 1002 - Assessment 1

1. Art and design often explore relationships between humans and non-humans, the environment and ecology. How can contemporary art and design propose new possibilities for imagining the ‘human’ and the environment?