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From Home to Asylum (or Deportation?)
The immersive exhibition “Passage to Asylum” encourages the visitor to engage with the lived experience of refugees closely and thoughtfully.
[The author would like to thank Nasreen Chowdhory for recommending the exhibition.]
During my MPhil coursework at the University of Delhi in 2019, I got an opportunity to visit an exhibition at the India International Centre (IIC) by the Centre for Refugee Law and Forced Migration Studies. “Passage to Asylum: The Journey of a Million Refugees” came out of the centre’s Migration and Asylum Project to make sense of the lived experience of refugees: How did they become refugees? what kind of challenges are they facing? The project notes that there are currently over 65 million displaced people in the world, of which over a third are refugees who have been forced to leave their countries due to war, conflict, persecution, and violence.
This immersive exhibition comprised six contiguous rooms that symbolically depicted the varying stages of a refugee’s journey: home, conflict, transit, alien country, asylum, and tribunal. If they are fortunate, they have asylum; if they are unfortunate, they face deportation. The corridor connecting these rooms represented the continuing limbo and turmoil of their lives. The rooms were designed to be viewed in accompaniment with their audio guide.
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