A frosted landscape of tents covered in powdery snow or is it the sand of a desert blizzard. A place at standstill, bathed in white light, and only a few people are out. In the foreground is a woman holding hands with a child. She is bending down to the child, listening to what it has to say. "UNHCR" read the blue letters on the tents - the UN Refugee Agency.
This is a poster I have at home. It's the one I picked from about 50 posters that are on view now at Ifa-Gallery Berlin in an exhibition with the title "Once We Were Trees. Now We Are Birds". The artists are all Martin Roth Fellows, a German initiative for artists at risk world-wide, and the exhibition is put together by a team of curators, Thibaut de Ruyter, Anna Karpenko, Emrah Gökdemir, and Muhammad Salah.
The exhibition itself is also in the form of posters, a medium that it is light to carry along and that, in these times of the digital, takes care of the analogue (and resistant?) distribution of information. We can take home as many as we want. This way, the exhibition has wings and enters various homes, becoming a multitude of permanent exhibitions.
Each poster in the show has a short text by the artist, which is printed on the back of the poster. My pick by artist Uygar Önder Șimșek is reduced to a minimum of words, yet with a long afterlife. It says:
Life is strange,
I photographed refugees for years, not knowing that one day
I would be one of them.
