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New York art show displays migrant routes

CCTV.com

07-22-2016 00:40 BJT

An art exhibition in New York maps the routes of eight migrants who made perilous journeys in search of a better life in Europe. The United Nations estimates more than 25-hundred people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean this year alone. The artist behind the exhibition hopes to provide a greater insight into the personal stories behind the statistics.

The long road to Europe. But for those that made this journey, these maps are more than just a sign of the distances travelled. They're a life line.

"Each migrant has undergone a radically different journey, many leaving the Arab world or other parts of the Middle East to find a new home in Europe, but often these journeys take them many many points beyond what they had hoped would be their ultimate destination," Stuart Comer, chief curator with Museum of Modern Art NYC, said.

The mapping journey project is the work of Moroccan-born Bouchra Khalili who began producing these videos back in 2008. The stories come from people she met in transit hubs across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, but Khalili wanted to keep their identities hidden.

"How often do you see images of a really freaked out looking refugee climbing through barbed wire or drowning or dead on a beach? I think rather than those kinds of shock tactics that are often used to deploy those images out into the world, this is a very different approach," Comer said.

Last year, more than a million asylum seekers and displaced people arrived in Europe. And with the public bombarded with statistics, some analysts say humanizing the issue can have a bigger impact.

"The fact of the matter is that when people, even that purport to be anti-immigrant or restrictionist and not wanting to help refugees, when they actually hear their stories and they get to meet them they can become actually quite sympathetic," Bill Frelick, director of Refugee Rights Program, Human Rights Program, said.

In the United States, it's a topic that's not going away.

Recent attacks like the ones in Orlando, Florida and Nice, France have brought the issue of immigration increasingly into focus. And through these nameless voices at the Museum of Modern Art, the Mapping Journey Project hopes to make the migrant crisis a little more personal.

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