Forced to Flee: Engaging with conflict and community responses to refugees
At the start, it felt like a strange thing to do: review an exhibition that you haven’t actually seen in real life. But in this strange year, I quickly moved beyond this as I became absorbed in the materials covering the Imperial War Museum (IWM) London’s Refugees: Forced to Flee exhibition.*
Forced to Flee is clearly an expansive exhibition and itself part of a larger Refugees focus at the museum. The exhibition covers a range of angles, such as the triggers for displacement, the journey that refugees have made, crossing borders, refugee camps, and reception in the UK. The exhibition looks at historical situations as well as recent displacement, and includes a huge amount of material. Some clear themes emerge from this multitude.
The strongest of these is an emphasis on the human, the personal experience. The inclusion of everyday recognisable objects that people forced to flee took with them encourages an empathetic response from the audience. This connection is explicitly invoked at times, with the exhibition text asking, ‘What would you bring?’. Individual stories are featured in a variety of media and the IWM website describes the exhibition as focussing on ‘deeply personal experiences of people who have been forced to flee their homes and the challenges they face in making their journey to safety and re-settling'. This centring of the personal is effective, and is likely to resonate with audience members who have less direct experience than me. I did worry that this approach came at the expense of an analysis of the politics that cause displacement, and that lie behind pushbacks of refugee movement. This political context, however, is addressed more concretely in later stages of the exhibition, in ‘Refugees Welcome?’ and ‘The Enemy Within’.
It was refreshing to see a nuanced perspective on the community response to refugees arriving in the UK. There is a tendency – understandable but, I think, misplaced – to repeat the mantra endorsed by the UK Home Office that the UK has a ‘proud history of welcoming refugees’. As a practitioner, I feel this presents an unhelpful and inaccurate picture of a decline in compassion. This framing can be counterproductive when as practitioners we are working to improve public perception and hospitality today. This exhibition reminds us that our history of welcome is not a simple ‘proud history’. A poster for the Mayor’s appeal for war refugees in Westminster, from 1940, is clear evidence of local endeavours to welcome. The ‘Two Million Refugees’ pamphlet from just a year earlier, however, shows that anti-refugee sentiment is not a new phenomenon. This diversity of material culture is illuminating, though in itself cannot indicate the scale of support for either of these positions.
Forced to Flee: (Left) Mayor’s appeal for war refugees in Westminster, 1940. (Right) Two Million Refugees, 1939. A British pamphlet published by the Nationalist Association.
It is perhaps unsurprising that an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum places such weight on ‘conflict’ in the displacement of people. While the exhibition text suggests that persecution is included within the IWM’s definition of conflict, the explanations of persecution still show a conflict-bias, with the majority of examples given those of war-based persecution. In such a heavy-hitting exhibition with the potential to reach new audiences, it felt like a missed opportunity to focus so strongly on the refugee situations that are already widely familiar to the public. If asked what they think of when they hear the word ‘refugee’, many people may cite someone fleeing the war in Syria; few would know to reference someone escaping cutting/FGM in Sierra Leone or political persecution in The Gambia.
This reservation notwithstanding, the experience of immersing myself in the exhibition materials made me very keen to go and see the exhibition in person when this is possible. I want to see for myself those precious items people salvaged when they fled. I want to experience the creatively curated rooms – such as the spaces covered in flocked wallpaper – and gaze at Indrė Šerpytytė’s Constellations installation (you can get a sense of it from the artist’s website). It is a shame that such an ambitious and timely exhibition will not be seen by more people.
*I couldn’t go in person to the museum because of Covid-19, but thanks to the Refugee History team, I was able to survey a large number of photographs of the exhibition and the material included within it. I also read the exhibition text, which gave a good sense of the curators’ presentation and framing of the material.
The header image, taken by the Refugee History editors, shows a hygiene pack donated to Red Cross by UNHCR, 1994, on display at the Forced to Flee exhibition.
This is one of four contributions to our round table on the Forced to Flee exhibition. The introduction, including links to all the contributions, can be found here.
