Library Exhibition: Migration Dreams and Nightmares - visit or watch the video

Alia Syed and Nadia Perrotta's exhibition in the Stuart Hall Library responds to themes of migrant experience in John Berger and Jean Mohr’s novel A Seventh Man. Watch a video (below) about Alia Syed's site-specific film installation On a Wing and a Prayer, currently on show until 31 May 2016.

John Berger and Jean Mohr's book, A Seventh Man, first published in 1975, is an intense exploration of the individual and collective experience of migration from departure to work and return but which also has timely resonances with the hopes and fears that are driving the movements of current migrants and refugees

The exhibition features Syed's new film On a Wing and a Prayer, created especially for the library, and will continue to evolve over its duration. The film imaginatively recreates the journey undertaken by Abdul Rahman Haroun who in August 2015 walked the entire 31 mile length of the Channel Tunnel in a bid to find asylum in the UK. He was arrested by the police and charged under the 1861 Malicious Damage Act. His trial is ongoing. For this installation the film is inserted into a book (a register of ships, evoking other migrations) and accompanied by maps of London and England overlaid with graphs visualising patterns of migration drawn from Berger's book.

The exhibition also features Traits and Lines #1, an artist's book created by Nadia Perrotta telling stories collected through interviews of migrants from her native southern Italy to the UK as well as with migrants from West Africa to Italy. The book is presented as parallel English and Italian texts and overlaid drawings. In the text she draws on her own experience of migration and with helping Anglophone communities from West Africa settle in Italy. The interviews provide the source material for a video work, I Hope for Something Good (2015), which builds to a cacophony of overlaid voices in multiple languages. Perrotta has also crystallised objects washed up on the Thanet shoreline that are evocative of the journeys undertaken.

The exhibition is part of a larger project, Migration Dreams and Nightmares, led by sociologists Nirmal Puwar and Mariam Motamedi Fraser from the Methods Lab at Goldsmiths and includes a concurrent exhibition at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as three seminars focusing on ‘the ways in which dreams, hopes, promises and aspirations are enfolded into the experiences of migration; specifically the connection between migrants' dreams and the nightmarish qualities of migration.'
A recording of the opening panel discussion with the artists and Nirmal Puwar (Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths) and Ashwani Sharma (Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, UEL) is available below.

Migration Dreams and Nightmares

Stuart Hall Library Research Network Event 19 November 2015
To listen to audio recordings of the event, please scroll down.

A panel discussion to mark the opening of Alia Syed and Nadia Perrotta’s exhibition in the library which responds to themes of migrant experience in John Berger’s novel 'A Seventh Man' (1973).

The panellists were Nirmal Purwar (Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths) Ashwani Sharma (Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, UEL), Nadia Perrotta (artist) Alia Syed (artist nominee for the 2015 Jarman Award).

Alia Syed, On a Wing and a Prayer (film still) 2015

Alia Syed showed her hypnotic film 'On a Wing and a Prayer' recording her walk through the alien environment of the Rotherhithe Tunnel. Alia was invited to respond to Berger's 'The Seventh Man' as part of  the Goldsmiths Methods Lab Project  Migration Dreams and Nightmares. Alia had been affected by a news story about the asylum seeker, Abdul Rahman Haroun, who had walked the 31 miles through the Channel Tunnel. Her film recreates the claustrophobia and fear that Haroun experienced during his nightmarish journey. 

Alia Syed and Nadia Perrotta

Nadia Perrotta interviewed six migrants during a journey to and from her native Italy and the UK. Her artists' book, 'Traits and Lines #1' contains transcripts of the interviews in English and Italian and overlapping drawings of the migrants. Nadia stressed the unique identities of the migrants by capturing the inaccuracies and idioms of language used by each individual. Her 'Crystalised Objects Archive' is also on display in the library which contains alum-coated flotsam collected from the Thanet shoreline, with echoes of dangerous migratory sea-crossings .

Ash Sharma and Nirmal Puwar

The artists' presentations were followed by reposes to the works from Ash and Nirmal, a lively discussion by the panel and questions from the audience.

The library exhibition is part of a larger project, Migration Dreams and Nightmares, led by Nirmal Puwar and Mariam Motamedi Fraser from the Methods Lab at Goldsmiths University of London. A concurrent exhibition and seminars at Goldsmiths "Migrating Dreams + Nightmares: Materials and Movement" Nov 2015-April 2016.