Photos: Brooklyn Exhibit Tells Refugee Story With 'Power Of Art'

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — A Philadelphia art project about refugees that has set up shop at the Brooklyn Army Terminal isn't only about the pieces on display, but the conversations that can stem from them, organizers said.

The exhibit, found at Sunset Park arts organization Brooklyn, is the culmination of a years-long project at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College that brought together artists, the school's historical records and Iraqi and Syrian refugees to tell stories about resettlement.

The result is a collection of interactive pieces — soundscapes, calligraphy, book sculptures and even a dress made from newspaper — that represent what the refugees want the world to know about them.

And although the physical pieces are important in themselves, the real power of the exhibit comes from the conversations it took to make the art and the conversations they will create, program manager Nora Elmarzouky said.

"Art has a power in and of itself — when we’re making things together, and talking about it and engaging with it," Elmarzouky said. "It's really important to have the exhibitions, but it's also equally important that we bring that process alive for audience members."

That process, Elmarzouky said, started by connecting artists with 15 refugee families in Philadelphia. The artists each set up workshops with the families that didn't only ask them to share their stories for an art piece, but to become part of the art-making process themselves.

One workshop, for instance, asked the "collaborators," as the refugee participants were called, to share negative media reports about resettlement or their own stories about discrimination, rip up the paper and use the scraps to make new paper. In others, collaborators learned book-binding by creating their own books or learned about calligraphy by writing poems on the paper they made.

"It was an effort to consider the past and reimagine a different future," Elmarzouky said. "They not only taught different techniques but created their own works with them. It's full circle."

Through the workshops many of the collaborators realized their own love for creating art, she added.

The project also included cultivating that newfound artistry by connecting the refugees with free classes or art programs or setting them up with art tables at bazaars or markets.

"A lot of people in this project...realized, 'Wow, this is so much more and can be so much more and means so much more,'" Elmarzouky said. "Many realized they were artists throughout."

The exhibit — called Friends, Peace and Sanctuary: Collaborative Works on Paper — has since shown at three spots in Philadelphia will be at Booklyn until the end of the week.

Elmarzouky said she hopes each showing of the exhibit can spark conversations as those in Philadelphia have.

"We got a lot of responses that were like, 'They‘re not that different from us — Arabs aren’t that different from Americans,'" she said. "A lot of this project is around humanizing. We’ve seen the power that this stuff can have."

For more information about the Brooklyn exhibit and a list of artists featured click here.