The UBC Centre for Migration Studies is pleased to announce the winners of its inaugural juried art competition. The competition was aimed at opening a conversation with both established and emerging artists who engaged with categories of migration and mobility. Two $1,500 grand prizes were awarded, one in each category, along with two honourable mentions.
For me, a border by Lucy Hunt (Oxford University) with Parwana Amiri. First prize (Migration Category) of the 2021 CMS Migration and Mobility International Art Competition.
Lucy Hunt, a researcher currently completing her PhD in Education at Oxford University, along with human rights activist Parwana Amiri, earned the top prize in the migration category for their digital ink project, For me, a border. The work, illustrated and stylized in comic form, depicts the experiences of Parwana Amiri and her vivid writings on living in refugee camps in Greece.
Juror Biz Nijdam, Assistant Professor in UBC’s Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, noted the power of this particular art form: “Comics on refugee experience offer new perspectives on the experience of millions of forcibly displaced people currently on the move. They not only shift the common focus of media campaigns on migrant experience to tell stories about the multifaceted issues facing migrants from a first-person perspective; they also render the typical objects of media representation the subjects of their own narrative.”
Hunt hopes the For me, a border comic will draw more attention to the displacement and difficult conditions in Greece’s refugee camps, raising awareness on mistreatment and putting pressure on Greek and European authorities to find solutions. She intends to donate the prize money to support refugees in Greece.
Impossible Cities by Gregory Gan (Freie Universität Berlin). First Prize (Mobility Category) of the 2021 CMS Migration and Mobility International Art Competition.
The grand prize in the mobility category was awarded to filmmaker, visual artist and anthropologist Gregory Gan for his project, Impossible Cities. Based on digital composites created in OpenStreetMap and Mapbox Studio, the work features illuminated linocuts of imaginary maps of Moscow, Paris, Berlin and New York, representing the artist’s experienced mobilities while conducting ethnographic fieldwork. These maps were constructed from memory and collaged together in geographically-impossible ways. By reinforcing the socially-constructed nature of mapmaking, Impossible Cities contends (in Gan’s own words) that, “every map, no matter how objectively it purports to convey reality, relies on cultural conventions created and defined by diverse, and at times disparate communities.” Ultimately, it asks its viewers “to contemplate representations of mobility in the way physical distance can be mapped using both physical and imagined distances, and as movement between virtual and material, tangible and intangible systems of meaning.”
Gan, who completed his PhD in the Department of Anthropology at UBC in 2019, currently holds a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität in Berlin.
Two additional honourable mention prizes, valued at $750 each, were awarded to projects in the migration category.
Bridget Bi, a UBC undergraduate student completing a degree in fine arts, earned an award for her experimental animation short film, The Feast Spins Incessantly, which “considers the linguistic hybridization of migrant individuals, who embody multiple languages and cognitive thinking.”
Manya Rezapour, a graduate student at Wismar University of Applied Science in Germany, also received an honourable mention. Her digital graphic artwork, Our Own Planetary Migration contemplates both planetary and human migration together, illustrating how the latter, just as the former, “alters life outcomes, social compositions, and the global trajectory of humankind.”
All of the winning projects, along with more detailed information and artist statements, can be viewed here.
