The Power of a Love Story
When the motor failed on the fragile dinghy carrying Sarah Ezzat Mardini, her sister, and 18 other asylum-seekers, Mardini jumped into the Aegean Sea. For more than three hours she swam, guiding the boat toward Greece’s shoreline. In Candace Breitz’ video installation Love Story, currently on display at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Mardini sits in front of a green screen, sharing the story of her journey from Damascus to Berlin, alongside five other refugees.
Their experiences could not appear more varied — we meet, for instance, Shabeena, a transgender woman who left repression and discrimination in Mumbai, José, who was abducted and forced to serve as a child soldier in the Angolan Civil War, and Mamy, who fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo after men working on behalf of President Joseph Kabila raided her home and assaulted her in front of her children.
Viewers only hear these testimonies from the refugees themselves, though, after watching them be performed by Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore, who play the six refugees as they would fictional characters. Breitz’ installation is a meditation on the politics of visibility, a reminder that we are quick to empathize with harrowing stories of war and violence when they are presented in films, only to turn around and overlook the millions of refugees experiencing suffering more devastating than any fiction writer could invent.
But for Mardini, one of the few refugees lucky enough to receive asylum status in Germany, the journey has not ended. In September, she was travelling back to Berlin when she was arrested and imprisoned by the Greek Police on charges of espionage and criminal enterprise. In an interview with the HPR, Alex Tarzikhan, one of Mardini’s closest friends and a fellow Syrian, described the arrest. Tarzikhan was dropping Mardini at the airport when they were approached by a group of policemen, who arrested Mardini and took her into custody. “I think it’s been 73 days now, today,” Tarzikhan said. “I would go and visit her in prison during the time that I was still [in Greece].” Now back in Boston, where she is pursuing a joint degree in law and public health, Tarzikhan has continued to fight for her friend’s release: “I’ve been closely monitoring the situation, trying to advocate, raise awareness, [and] start a social media campaign,” she recounted.
Mardini’s story is a complex one — she is, at once, a refugee, an advocate, a swimmer, a prisoner, a friend, a sister, and so much more. Breitz’ exhibit begins to portray this intricacy, offering a reminder that to reduce an individual to their refugee status is to forget their innate humanity and worth. Victimhood is a part of Mardini’s narrative, but it is not her whole story. When Tarzikhan describes Mardini, she is not describing a representative of the refugee experience, but a close friend. She reminisces about meeting Mardini’s family when she visited Germany, and talks about their friend group: four girls, “all best friends.” The beauty of Breitz’ exhibit, for Tarzikhan, is its ability to capture Mardini in her entirety: “When you see the video of Sarah speaking, it’s truly Sarah’s personality … it’s genuine, it’s truly her.”
In the context of the refugee crisis, this is the power of art: to humanize a discourse so often bereft of empathy, to restore agency and individuality in a conversation dominated by statistics and stereotypes. In the face of reductive political narratives, art can demonstrate the emotion of the refugee experience, making it a crucial tool in the fight against apathy and xenophobia.
A Source of Common Ground
For Ahmed Badr, a former Iraqi refugee and undergraduate at Wesleyan University, the power of art is the power of storytelling. In collaboration with Syrian architect Mohamad Hafez, Badr created Unpacked: Refugee Baggage, an exhibit exploring the power of “home.” “I interviewed 10 refugee families, and then Mohamad took those stories and recreated people’s homes in a series of suitcases,” Badr explained in an interview with the HPR. What makes this exhibit special is that it has no agenda. “You don’t have to think refugees are good or bad, you’re just simply hearing people’s stories of what they’ve learned and what they’ve overcome — I always like to say that it’s hard to argue with someone’s personal experience.”
Brian Sokol, an independent photographer whose work documenting humanitarian crises has been published in TIME, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, echoes Badr’s account of art’s capacity to build common understanding. One of Sokol’s projects, a portraiture exhibit entitled The Most Important Thing, features interviews with refugees from the Central African Republic, Sudan, Myanmar, Angola, Mali, and Syria. He asks each refugee to share with him the most important object they brought with them when they fled.
What makes the question powerful is its universality, Sokol explained in an interview with the HPR. “If you were to say, ‘If your house were to burn down, what would you bring with you?,’ anybody would be able to put themselves into those shoes.” Asking about the most important thing, Sokol said, “is a vehicle that opens up a space for people to imagine an experience that otherwise they might not be able to, the experience of someone from an unimaginably different background from the majority of the audience.”
Beyond Empathy
Art, though, is far from apolitical. The empathy and nuance created when viewers interact with the refugee experience in artistic spaces are important precisely because they have the power to shift political attitudes. This jump, from empathy to action, is a crucial one. Makeda Best, Harvard Art Museums’ photography curator, views artistic engagement as a first step in a longer process of refugee advocacy: “The question with installations is, what is the action that comes out of it? Is it productive to make people feel sorry?”
The hope is that the understanding created by exhibits like Love Story does translate into the political sphere, by making viewers less xenophobic and more open-minded. But art can be even more beneficial when it offers its audience an outlet for those feelings. By including information on tangible steps that viewers can take to offer assistance or advocate for refugees, artists can help bridge the gap between feeling and doing.
In the age of media proliferation, translating the emotion created by art into political action may be particularly challenging. Artists lose control over their work when images enter the public sphere, where they can be manipulated or presented without context. Best explained to the HPR that the biggest challenge in using art to shift discourse is that “the media environment doesn’t have space for nuanced stories.” She hopes to see artists “use their creative energy to figure out ways of getting around this.” That process can take many different forms — “we can talk about photographic literacy, we can talk about creating visual reports for the UN that are more sensitive to how refugees are portrayed, this is how we are going to position everyday images in ways that make people think critically about what they are seeing.” Entering spaces beyond the museum walls, then, may be a crucial next step for artists who want to use their work to create change.
When ‘Help’ Hurts
But while artists can challenge stereotypes and assumptions about refugees, they can also reflect and perpetuate them. Artists, just like politicians, journalists, and humanitarian workers, risk exploiting refugees’ stories in the interest of creating a narrative. What makes Breitz, Badr, and Sokol’s work so compelling is each artist’s commitment to centering the perspectives and desires of the refugees with whom they work at every stage of the artistic process. Too often, refugees are treated as passive bystanders in their own lives, and artists who engage without challenging this assumption do a disservice to the refugee communities they intend to represent.
Art is helpful, Badr argues, when artists “give the narratives back to the people that they belong to, and ask how they are taking in their experience and how they’re choosing to express it to the world.” Tarzikhan’s praise for Breitz’s exhibit follows a similar logic: Breitz “really tried to put the refugees in the spotlight, she really makes sure to put them in the forefront and to empower them to participate in whatever it is that she’s trying to do.”
According to Best, artists who place themselves at the center of their projects are perpetuating biases, not helping refugees. “Photographers in particular tend to operate with the conceit that they have the power to offer something, that they have the power to restore three-dimensionality to refugees, and that’s a problem.” Only by being aware of and addressing “issues of power and access,” Best argues, can photographers “get away from that conceit, and let [refugees] create their own images.”
As an American photographer without any claim to the refugee experience, Sokol understands the importance of being intentional with his work, and of never exploiting or minimizing the refugees whose stories he shares. For him, “It’s about getting to know a person and actually building some degree of rapport before you ever take out a camera … you have to familiarize yourself with the context and get to know the individual before you have any right to portray them directly.” Artists who enter refugee communities with a sense of entitlement to deeply personal narratives have the capacity to do more harm than good — Tarzikhan cautions that “when [artists] ask a refugee to relive their experience, there’s always the issue of re-traumatization, and so people need to be skillful and mindful, and to make sure that [the refugees’] voices are truly the ones that are highlighted.”
When artists enter the conversation with compassion and respect, the experience of sharing testimony can be a mutually beneficial one. Conducting interviews for Unpacked, Badr recalls how “sometimes a quarter of the way or halfway through the interview [he would] see someone realize that they have a story to tell and that their story is valid.” This, for Badr, is the beauty of his work — “I really cherish those moments, because there’s this agency that’s realized, and that is so beautiful to witness.” In Sokol’s experience, the interview process “frequently seemed to bring an element of catharsis, as there’s a sense that somebody wants to hear their story, that they’re not just an anonymous figure, that their individual experience matters.”
Image Credit: Rodney Nelson/Nelson Imaging