Art as a Counter-Narrative to Forced Migration

Ismail Einashe, a Nairobi-based journalist, argues that art can reclaim the humanity of forcibly displaced people, whose number exceeded 100 million for the first time in 2022 according to the UN. He contrasts a Guardian photograph of migrants landing at Dungeness, Kent, with artworks that offer dignity and personhood. Across the Channel, Calais has been a symbolic border since William Hogarth's 1748 painting 'O the roast beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais)', which depicted xenophobic sentiments. Mona Hatoum's 'Exodus II' (2002) uses suitcases and hair to evoke displacement, while Zarina Hashmi's 'Letters from Home' (2004) maps fractured identity through prints based on her sister's Urdu letters. Einashe criticizes Christoph Büchel's 2019 Venice Biennale display 'Barca Nostra', a shipwrecked boat with no context, as exploitative. He reflects on his own experience fleeing Somalia in 1988 and finds solace in Mustafa Saeed's photographs from the 'Home and Me' series (2014), which evoke Somali landscapes and rituals. The essay concludes that both migration and artmaking are acts of imagination and hope. Einashe's book 'Look Again: Strangers' was published by Tate in July 2023.