Beauty in Resilience

As you journey through the exhibit, we offer a guiding question

How does one read the cultural and artistic representations of and by refugees through a critical refugee studies lens?

With the refugee story, an emphasis on the sensational and spectacular is favored, an emphasis that forecloses analyses of the global historical conditions that produce the “crisis” and impel refugee movement in the first instance. Critical Refugee Studies, or CRS, instead urges an emphasis on lived lives – how refugees have created their worlds and made meaning for themselves. This project aims to dispel narratives perpetuated by the common refugee representations in global media by contrasting refugee depictions in Greco-Roman antiquity and their representational politics, with refugee art from the Vietnam War.

Many of the following artifacts showcase the missing frames of war, imperialism, and militarization that structure the conditions of global displacement—and our complicity with such processes. Displaced from view are the invisible relations of power that broker how we see and consume the refugee subject. While refugees are ubiquitous in mainstream culture and media, they signal very little beyond the fact of their suffering.