World Refugee Day is Monday, June 20. An exhibit at New Haven Museum focuses on the contemporary Middle Eastern refugee experience, with work by six artists based in New Haven. Another exhibit in New Haven, at Knights of Columbus Museum, is a reminder that refugees have been fleeing troubled lands in search of a better life for centuries.
New Haven Museum
When Maher Shakir was growing up in Baghdad, Iraq, owning a gun was legal. Owning a camera wasn’t. “A gun can kill people, but a camera can tell the world,” Shakir said. He took pictures anyway. Twice police broke his cameras, so he took more pictures on the sly.
Shakir worked at a supply warehouse for the U.S. Army. Soon after the war started in 2003, he got a letter that warned “If you don’t leave the country we will kill you and kill your family.” Then his father was shot and survived. The family left, settling at first in a refugee camp in Jordan.
Shakir took his camera with him and shot pictures of people he met at the refugee camp. Shakir —and his sister, painter Wurood Mahmood — are two of six refugee artists showing their work at New Haven Museum’s exhibit “Stories From Near and Far: Refugee Artists in New Haven.”
In a photo by Shakir, a Syrian boy cowers in a darkened doorway, his hands over his ears. “I think he had PTSD, from the bombs,” Shakir said. A little Syrian girl stares at the camera and cries. “She kept asking ‘where is my mom?’ and they would tell her ‘your mom will come back later’ but her mom died in Syria. They kept lying to her,” he said. “She would see the other families and she was all alone.”
An Iraqi man smokes a cigarette and stares into space. “He was just sitting there. He was sad. His three sons went to the United States,” Shakir said. “He said, ‘I will never see them again’.” Another Iraqi man refused to talk to Shakir except to say ‘life is just terrible.”
One photo has no people, just a close-up image of a padlocked door. “When you left Iraq, you did not say goodbye to your neighbors. You just left,” he said. “They might think you got killed.”
Moussa Gueye left Mauritania in 2003, after being arrested for speaking out about how blacks were treated in that country. “They don’t want you to wake up the majority. They make up a false case against you,” he said. He moved his family to Senegal for their protection and then went to the United States alone. In the years before he was granted asylum and could bring his family here, he began painting to “take the loneliness away.”
His mixed-media works are symbolic stories of displacement. “End of the Tunnel” shows a small yellow circle and a larger circle in a red background. It looks like a moon revolving around a planet, but Gueye said it is a story of the refugee experience. “Anybody who seeks asylum has the same story. You are in trouble and life becomes very small to you. You want to survive,” he said. “Then there is a country that will welcome you and you go from trouble to freedom.”
His work “Healing” is a call to forget past tragedies and forge ahead. “Do you move on or keep thinking about revenge?” he said. “The best thing is to heal, not to forget 100 percent, but it was the past, and it’s time to build a new life.”
Ridha Ali Ahmed, a native of Tuz, Iraq, who was persecuted because of his Turkmen ethnicity, uses elongated chairs as the common thread in his series of symbolic sculptures. “Refugee Suitcase” shows a hollow suitcase sitting on a chair, carrying only a pencil, a heart and a rose. “Building from the Inside” is a chair draped by a kite, a common pastime in Iraq. “Life’s Balancing Act” is a chair topped by a chaotic pile of other chairs.
Dariush Rose, who fled Iran in 2010 due to persecution against Christians, creates lovely handmade Persian tiles and clay sculptures with themes of enclosure and breaking of chains.
The final refugee artist is clay maskmaker Johnny Mikiki Bombenza, a Congolese war refugee who died last year. Mohamad Hafez, a native of Damascus who is not a refugee but who creates art of the refugee experience, contributed a mobile “Mama, I Don’t Know How to Swim,” made of paper boats, fishhooks and fighting weights, to comment on refugees who flee their homelands on rickety boats.
K Of C Museum
Knights of Columbus Museum’s exhibit, “Fleeing Famine: Irish Immigration to North America, 1845-1860” is centered on six paintings by British maritime artist Rodney Charman. Charman depicted boats that carried starving families to America and Canada. Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum in Hamden is devoted entirely to artwork and artifacts about the Potato Blight, which killed 1 million people and sent 1.5 million packing. The K of C exhibit focuses exclusively on the famine’s refugee experience and the death-plagued “coffin ships” that carried the people away.
All of Charman’s paintings show real-life incidents. “The Amelia Mary” illustrates an incident in May 1847 when a boat left Donegal, after which the captain realized he had 17 more passengers than were permitted by law, so he off-loaded 17 people on an island. “The Hannah” is based on an April 1849 voyage during which a boat bound for Quebec hit an ice reef and began sinking. The captain and first and second officers took the only lifeboat and left the passengers and crew to fend for themselves. Of the almost 200 people on board, 129 eventually were rescued.
Other paintings tell happier stories of arrivals at port, or merely stories of shipboard life, with crowds huddled together cooking or enjoying the sunshine.
Heart-rending bronze sculptures on loan from the Hamden museum tell stories of families torn apart, ships crowded well past capacity and the constant fear of death on the seas.
A ship replica in the gallery tells the story of John F. Kennedy’s great-grandfather, a famine refugee.
“STORIES FROM NEAR AND FAR: REFUGEE ARTISTS IN NEW HAVEN” is at New Haven Museum, 114 Whitney Ave., until Sept. 10. On World Refugee Day, Monday, June 20, admission is free. newhavenmuseum.org.
“FLEEING FAMINE: IRISH IMMIGRATION TO NORTH AMERICA 1845-1860” is at the Knights of Columbus Museum, One State St. in New Haven, until Sept. 17, 2017. Admission is free. kofcmuseum.org.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited from a previous version to correct the name of the exhibit.
