My name is Safdar Ahmed, I'm one of the founders of the Refugee Art Project.
Our project was started in late 2010 for the purpose of providing art
workshops for asylum seekers and refugees in the Villawood detention centre.
Our participants are people who have been through the detention system
from such countries as Iran, Afghanistan
Sri Lanka, Syria and Burma for instance.
And with the artwork taken from our workshops we then in
collaboration with our participants exhibit them to the Australian public,
put them online. We've self-published our own zines in order to try and educate
the community and to challenge some of the misconceptions that surround the refugee issue.
The comic that I drew about the Villawood detention center is
based on my experiences of visiting Villawood on behalf of the Refugee
Art Project over the last five and a half years.
It collates many of the impressions that I've gathered as a visitor as well as
some of the direct things people have told me; the stories and experiences of
refugees and the people I've known. The most personal aspect of it was the death
of a friend of mine Ahmed Ali Jafari who was a participant in our art workshop for
one year. We knew him really well, we saw him every week.
That was a very difficult thing to deal with. He died from a heart attack inside
the detention center in 2013.
So that's also in the comic. I think the comic tries to show the atmosphere
of anxiety and uncertainty, the mental health crisis that exists in our detention system.
It also tries to convey some of the daily life experiences that refugees
have related to me, that the small incremental humiliation of having your
autonomy and your liberty deprived by being held in indefinite mandatory
detention and how that plays out. The lack of privacy,
the yearning for intimacy that people experience when they're isolated in that
environment for such a long period of time. So I think the comic tries to show
a bunch of things just to give a general impression of what life is like,
daily life is like inside the detention center.
My art practice is concerned I think mostly with the mediums of drawing and
printmaking and comics and I find those forms very interesting because they're
very direct and very raw.
The tradition of underground comics inspires me because it's very irreverent
and self-reflexive, sometimes very rude, sometimes very direct way of
communicating. And so in my own work
I try to address issues of identity, my own history
my family history and I enjoy the self-revealing sort of self analyzing
aspect of of comic memoirs that you get in underground comics.
So I think art has played a strong role in my life in recovering from things
like depression when I was a teenager and so I'm a firm believer in
the power of art to give agency to people to give them a voice to help
people resolve whatever issues it is in their lives just to make sense of the
world in a way. And so I guess in that spirit I think Refugee Art project - I hope -
has also provided that opportunity for some of our participants to express
themselves to understand something of their own situation and to communicate
that to other people and I think art in that context can be very empowering and
very inspiring.