Global Issues
ASIA: Through Art, A Look at Migrants’ Temporary State of Being
'Migrant workers are not aliens,' sang a local music band here called Paradon. 'Any kind of work that Thais don’t do, they do it for Thais. No matter how dirty, they do it for Thai. Which job is dangerous, they do. They do it for Thais. Though it is a demeaning job, they do it. They do it for Thais.'
Sung by the band to open an art exhibition on migrant workers in Thailand this week, the lyrics — like the art works on show at gallery -- aim to get Thais thinking about the more than two million migrants who live in their midst but are often deprived of key rights in the host society that benefits from their labour.
Both the art works, ranging from paintings to photography to video, installation art and animation, and the song aim to use creative means to discuss publicly — and more perhaps more effectively -- the human face of migrants and the challenges they face.
This is the focus of ‘Illegal, Temporary and Precarious States of Being — Migration’, an exhibition that highlights the contradictions faced by migrant workers who are not always accepted or appreciated for their contributions.
Thailand itself — a magnet for migrants from neighbouring countries like Burma, Cambodia and Laos -- is in the midst of a controversial debate about its policy on migrant workers.
After trying different kinds of registration processes, the Thai government has set Feb. 28 as the deadline by which some 1.3 million migrant workers with temporary work permits need to pass a process of 'national verification' if their status is to be legalised so they can continue to work and stay in the country.
In the mixed media installation ‘Everything Reminds Me to Remember You #1’, it is hard to clearly identify the many shapes of faces, printed in black and at times overlapping one another, on the unequal lengths of off-white fabric hanging from the several panels that make up the art work. The bars on top of the panels from which the fabrics hang have rows of toy figures of soldiers, their guns pointed in different directions. 'The work shows how this (life) is temporary. It is not stable, just like the life of a migrant,' said Estelle Cohenny, an artist and coordinator from Studio Xang in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai who did the installation.
The many faces in the fabric represent how people at the border have many identities — their traditional faces, their social faces. Crossing borders also allows migrants to move across these different identities. Cohenny said that using black for the faces means migrants often lose their identity as well. That is why 'you don’t really see the faces (well),' she added.
She also has a video installation, called ‘Thailurma Bound’, which focuses on the crossing of the border between Thailand’s Mae Sot province and Burma’s Myawaddy province, separated by a ‘friendship bridge’.
Liz Hilton, another of the eight artists whose works are featured in the exhibition at the Pridi Banomyong Institute, explained that a lot of big, legalistic terms and 'propaganda words' are often used when talking about migration. But in the end, the simple reason for why people move about and migrate is to search for a better life, she said.
Thus, Hilton’s installation ‘Reflecting on Today... Imagining Tomorrow’ uses small toys, including toy figures of people, to create a landscape that allows viewers a chance to recreate how they think migrants’ lives should be like. Her work also shows different people coming into the same country as migrants, including business people and tourists, but those are more welcome than migrant workers.
In an interview, she says she hopes that playing with little toys can help people focus on the key human issues in migration and show policymakers and authorities how complicated the law is when applied to real situations.
'I expect people to play with these little toys to see how the people on the move can live together, how people can work fairly and safely, how they can be accepted,' Hilton explained. 'I don’t expect one answer but everyone has their own answers. This is very open for the people to imagine. It depends on their experience and status.'
'I also think that migrants, when they cross the border, live with a lot of ‘buts’, like they can stay but they don’t have a card, but they don’t have rights, but, but, but,' she continued. 'They should not have that ‘but’.'
Playing with toys can help break down complicated issues, Hilton added. 'If you draw a picture, or write or take a picture of something, like the police taking money, it is difficult to do. It can make people fearful or embarrassed,' she said. 'With little toys, it seems to be more fun. The toy police are taking the money from the toy migrant, so people might be able to have fun with that -- but it is (still) true though.'
Also featured in the exhibition, which continues till the end of February, is ‘Tyred People’, which uses the pond at the Pridi Banomyong Institute to show the lengths migrants go to because of their undocumented status. In particular, this shows how Burmese migrants use rubber tyres to cross the Moei river to reach northern Thailand.
The exhibition also features other works such as drawings by Thai artist Somchai Panitsap, photographs by Nic Dunlop and John Hulme, video by China’s Liu Lifen and Thailand’s Sutthirat Supaparinya, animation by Maryanne Coutts.
'The lives of migrants are sometimes difficult to put in words. They don’t have time to write or maybe people don’t have time to read either,' said Jackie Pollock, director of the Migrant Assistance Programme (MAP) based in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.
'Therefore, an exhibition (like this) will be a good format to have people look at things differently,' Pollock said at the opening of the exhibition, which was organised by MAP along with the Asian Institute of Technology and Leeds University in Britain.
'I hope that the works (here) will inspire people to think and learn more about migrant life,' said Cohenny.
© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service