Copenhagen is home to something remarkably new and different in art: CAMP, a Centre for Art on Migration Politics as supported by a number of sponsors including the Danish Arts Council.
Recently they inaugurated their exhibition space with the show and exhibition Camp Life. The Curational team, ‘Kuratorisk Aktion’ behind the event, has planned a programme totalling 5 solo- and group shows that goes well into 2016.
In the wake of recent boat refugee disasters, the work has become as pertinent as ever. CAMP raises awareness of the little understood plight of refugees. The non-profit exhibition venue organise exhibitions to trace artistic responses to displacement, borders, undocumented migration, deportation, and offer visions for alternative migration and refugee policies.
CAMP is intended to give artists a platform to voice what a continous struggle it is to be a refugee or asylum seeker.
There is good news for anyone hit by the oft-quoted ‘compassion fatigue’, you know the one that afflicts the general public, but never ourselves as individuals.
The whole idea of CAMP is not limited to presenting a problem as much as it is that of suggesting ways of solving it.
The objective is, through art, to stimulate greater understanding between displaced people and the communities that receive them, and to stimulate new visions for a more inclusive and equitable migration, refugee, and asylum policy
Camp Life
The current exhibition Camp Life examines experiences with Danish asylum centres, and Australian detention centres. Some work examines the bizarre logic a site where a population is divided into two and the ‘undesirables’ are placed. Other work shed light on the flight routes that many refugees and migrants have followed prior to being detained in a refugee camps or detention centres.
Half of the contributing artists and collectives are refugees themselves and are thus first-hand witnesses who have spent time inside refugeee camps.
The participanting artists are: Barat Ali Batoor (Afghanistan/Australia), Ursula Biemann (Switzerland), Nermin Durakovic (Bosnia Hercegovina/Denmark), Nanna Katrine Hansen (Denmark), Murtaza Ali Jafari (Afghanistan / Australia), Dady de Maximo (Rwanda), Migreurop (transnational), Trampoline House Women’s Club (transnational/Denmark) in collaboration with Nanna Katrine Hansen (Denmark), Habib Mohseni (Afghanistan/Denmark), Blake Shaw (USA/Germany) & Kipanga Typeson (DR Congo/Denmark).
You can find out more by visiting campcph.org and www.facebook.com/campcph
Image credits
Top: © Barat Ali Batoor, The Unseen Road to Asylum, 2013
