Ai Weiwei’s Safe Passage, which is an accumulation of many life jackets that were actually worn by Syrian refugees as they cross the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe seeking safety – this last very dangerous portion of their journey, where many people don’t survive that crossing. And these are the actual lifejackets from people. 

And that piece, and, and a lot of Ai Wei Wei’s work leaves me with so many questions. He seems to really have wanted to address the global refugee crisis. But I feel that it’s not clear what audiences are sort of to make of the overwhelming collection of the life jackets. So the impulse of the artist seems to be to wake audiences up to the humanitarian cost of the ongoing war in Syria and the incredible number of refugees it has produced. 

 I wonder what does the witnessing of these life jackets mean for the viewer. The number of them is staggering, but what are we to take from seeing them in this sanitized display? What Hamid Dabashi calls, “an aesthetic disconnect”, removed from a connection to the people affected, people’s actual lived experience, whether they survived or not, all they had lost in their forced migration, all they face in the uncertain journey ahead. Is any of that reflected in seeing the spectacle of the life jackets? 

It seems to sort of trivialize the situation of the people who have gone through and are going through this journey. And because they’re the actual life jackets of refugees, it feels so weighty. I worry that it gives the audiences a sense that they’ve done something profound by witnessing it, when these are the real lives of people who don’t know that their life jackets are here on display. And there’s something problematic about that. 

I think that maybe Ai Wei Wei’s impulse is a frustration with the very social media culture that sees things for a second, and then they slip by, and they slip off of our radar. And so, it seems like there’s an impulse to wake us up from that constant scrolling through headlines and stories and images. You know, he’s really making a lot of these refugee and other humanitarian crises that aren’t always his story, and he doesn’t seem to include people whose stories they are in the framing of them. And so it, there’s a feeling of co-opting. It leaves me with a question of to what end is he making this work really?

I’m Lana Barkawi. I’m the executive and artistic director of Mizna.

Exodus II, by Mona Hatoum: I feel really connected to it as someone who’s also Palestinian, and who also- whose family has also lived that experience of exile that’s permanent. It seems, unfortunately … It seems that the Palestinian situation is to be in a state of exile whether being kind of a state of exile within a homeland because of the occupation and the way that there is very little freedom or being exiled and truly not able to return. And that experience of having lived out of suitcases and moved from place to place as a child, it feels very familiar. So that piece really spoke to me.

Having physical human hair in the piece is a bit off-putting, but also intriguing and compelling and brings something so human and tangible to this conceptual piece. That idea of the human beings that you leave behind in each move that you are sort of forced to make once you are forced to leave. The connection with human hair maybe hearkens to the idea that you’re connected to real people, real ancestors, people that you will never know and then not only are you separated in time from them, but you’re also separated from the context of knowing them in the place where they were- and where you came from, and that whole context of everything that is home. It maybe also represents that sort of cutting off of relationships and … And the- the thing that makes it so painful, of course, is that it wasn’t a choice.

One of the situations of being in exile is the fear of losing connection and of losing memories and of not knowing where you came from and the fear that older generations have for younger generations who never have experienced the place that you had to leave. And then, of course, the suitcases themselves are such strong symbols of exile. They’re tangible symbols of exile, and my family experience is one of having moved so often as a child, not only because of being displaced subsequently after having to leave Palestine, but for my nuclear family, my parents, seemed to always be seeking … For some number of years of my childhood, seemed to always be seeking a place that felt like home. And that there was this idea that there was a place that would make them feel that sense of community and seeking a rootedness that was just missing.

What I understand Richard Mosse is doing is taking surveillance technology that’s military technology where the effect is aesthetically very beautiful, taking it and I think trying to make a comment about it. But I wonder what that comment really is because doing the same thing as the military. He’s miles away from people, they don’t know they’re being recorded and they’re black and brown refugees who have their stories of why they’re on this path but they’re presented as a mob. And so, I’m not sure what viewers are meant to make of it, and it’s not clear to me how this is playing with the form or the technology except to make something aesthetically imposing and that makes you stop and really draw a breath and be surprised. 

That piece is deeply problematic and it, maybe is quite dangerous in that way. It seems to actually just be reproducing the way that it’s used in a military context but just bringing that into an art museum. It’s a racist impulse. To do a work like this is a racist impulse. What if you use this idea on people who are as privileged as you? What does it mean to be surveilled, to be at the other end of a camera and the other end of a military machine? As museum goers are a majority white and middle class and better, to have the camera pointed on that audience would be so powerful if they were also taped in that way without consent. 

It wouldn’t work because the privilege that they have would…there would be an outcry. You just wouldn’t be able to do that. So, I think that’s a very interesting thing to think about is the fact that the subjects of his work have no agency and he’s benefiting from that. It’s really a problem.

For me, this piece sparks questions about how the art world works. This exhibition traveled to Mia from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where it was initially curated. What sort of agency does the receiving institution have in accepting the show? Were there opportunities to push back on or to refuse particular pieces? We can also think about what the conversations have been within the institution and also if a community advisory group functions to shield the institution from critique.