Foreword
For thousands of years, difference has challenged, renewed, surprised, upset and enhanced the way we live, and forced us to make choices. Border control, religious laws, history and economic arguments have all been used to manage the arrival of newcomers. In the years after the First World War, Governments around the world consciously imposed restrictions on the movement of people by introducing passports and limits on migration. At the same time, all throughout history, the exchange between cultures has strongly enriched societies all over the world. The exchange of art, food, tradition, cultural practices or political system has allowed us to draw form the experience of other cultures and has shaped the lives of people across the globe.
Today, the power of the media and internet have amplified this cross-cultural exchange and allowed us to engage with difference more regularly. This means that dialogue across borders is not solely in the hands of politicians leaders and diplomats, but can be led by ordinary people, whose commitment to accepting diversity is vital. In the increasingly mobile and interconnected world of today, how we respond to difference on an individual and local scale has a global impact. We must therefore think beyond boundaries of all kinds to ensure our progress and social evolution.
The British Council has been facilitating dialogue and building trust through mutually beneficial relationship with people in other countries for over 70 years. Living Together, a project on intercultural dialogue involving over 25 countries from North, center and South-East Europe, encourages collaboration and action on the issues that arise as a result of the complexities of living and working in the continually changing societies of today. The project focuses in particular on the impact of migration on home and host societies, and the way that minority communities participate (or not) in public life. Living Together reflects the belief that celebrating difference is crucial to the development of societies in the long term, and that dialog between people is an essential component in learning to embrace diversity.
This exhibition, Close to Home, is one of the many outputs of our project showing the power of communication beyond borders and the benefit of sharing and engaging across cultures. We believe that though the of openness and a willingness to listen as well as speak, we can empower people to respond to difference in a new way, to participate in a global society, and use our diversity, as well as similarities, to the benefit of a more inclusive, trusting and understanding world.
MARTIN DAVIDSON
Chef Executive, British Council
Close to Home
I am on my way home. As I walk up the steep hill with my weekend bags in tow, I hear children in the near distance. The clashing of pots and pans echoes down the rows of terraced kitchens, jutting out into the garden with their modem extensions. I step over broken toys on the pavement and make my way steadily onward. The smell of cooking mixed with fresh laundry powder brings back memories of my own childhood. Not much has changed since my last visit a short while ago, but the sounds and smells of home take me right back. For those, like me, who choose to live elsewhere and return home sporadically, it can be a Proustian moment, recreating the past through memory, as when the taste of a madeleine cake dipped in tea suddenly transports him to Sunday mornings at Combray with his Aunt Leonie.
Reflecting on this exhibition, close to Home, and the Living Together project of which it is part, I am also reminded of my reasons for leaving home, and my thoughts turn to others in other places, who decide to stay, or whose decision to leave home is forced upon them.
My grandfather left the Punjab for industrial Yorkshire to make a better life for himself and his family in the textile boom of the 1950S. That better life he sought is part of an ongoing journey finally reaching completion in my generation. When I visit the open green plains ofthe Punjab, however, and see the workers cycling home from the fields as the sun sets, I know my grandfather must eventually have regretted leaving all this for a foreign land, whatever its promise of prosperity.
The promise of prosperity is only one of many reasons for migration, and a relatively positive one at that. There is of course a regular mass migration of young people from rural to urban areas in search of work. Other influential factors may be 'pulling' or 'pushing', and include cultural, social and personal circumstances, the changing nature of cities, and general political and economic pressures. Or people may be forced to leave their homes as a result of war, famine or fear of persecution.
The pattern of global movement of people has changed radically over the years. While travel between countries has become easier and cheaper than ever before, correspondingly greater controls are in place at borders, filtering who mayor may not enter a country. Similarly, relocation can be viewed as temporary by those for whom return is a realistic option. Others today may have more in common with nineteenth-century migrants to the New World, who went in the knowledge that coming back would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
These days one need not go far to find a slice of another culture. Think of Little India, Chinatown, and so on. We live in a multicultural world. Cultural, ethnic and religious minority communities thrive in inner-city areas once considered slums, and establish homes that are often steeped in traditional values - sometimes more so than the distant homeland they or their forebears left behind. This can reinforce a solidarity to counter the collective discrimination such minorities regularly suffer.
In Close to Home the two broad yet interlocking themes explored are migration and minority communities within South-East Europe. Aspects addressed by the eight lens-based artists in the exhibition include displacement, integration, assimilation and exclusion. The task of selection was not easy, and entailed research into migration in and around Europe, and thought for the implications of choices, bearing in mind the range of concerns brought out in each artist's work. For some, the story depicted is of a particular set of circumstances, a particular country, a particular conflict. of course it would be impossible to cover all the locations affected or to address all aspects of an individual situation. Nevertheless, the issue of migration and the challenges faced by the minority groups it creates and affects have relevance for us all.
Photography plays a vital role in the way these concerns become visible; most especially social photography, which claims to show the truth about social situations in that the images are not manipulated, and the subjects not influenced, although these points are often contested. As a genre, its origins date back to the mid nineteenth century .
Key in American social photography is the work of Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940), who photographed immigrants arriving in New York, and documented their life in the city's tenements and sweatshops. Hine was concerned for the welfare of the underprivileged, and his work on the exploitation of children was crucial to the introduction of national child labour laws in 1916.
Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914) was another major American practitioner. In the 1880s he photographed slum life in New York, portraying the living and working conditions of immigrants, and publishing some of the images in his book How the Other Halfiives (1890). He also used the photographs to illustrate lectures aimed at convincing his audience ofthe need for social change. Riis's work helped initiate slum-clearance projects in New York.
In Europe a prominent example is the philanthropist Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905), famous for establishing homes for destitute children. In the 1870S he began photographing London's homeless children for record-keeping and fundraising purposes. His images epitomized the successful social documentary photograph, capturing objective description and, in poignant 'before and after' pairings, demonstrating the efficacy of social intervention.
Today truth and documentary are more complicated to work with. Postmodernism argues that any sort of objective truth is impossible, and that the best we can hope for is an understanding of different subjective truths. In acknowledgement of this, the present selection has tried to include work that explores migration and minority from a range of different perspectives. It was essential in addition to consider the reasons for migrating and to tie these back to the notion of home as an ideal- even where this appears to have been compromised, as in the work of Dana Popa.
Not Natasha is Popa's ongoing project about sex-trafficked women who have escaped and come home to Moldova, often scarred and traumatized by their ordeal. Some of Pop a's subjects have returned to parents and husbands who welcome them back despite the stigma of prostitution. Some relatives have also accepted the children fathered by pimps or clients. Less fortunate women have been disowned and ostracized by their families. For those who were originally sold to traffickers by relatives and loved ones, home is not a haven; yet there seemed to be nowhere else to go.
Popa has worked alongside the International Office for Migration (10M) in Moldova, with the support of the UN and organizations such the Poppy Project which provide trafficked women with safe houses, medical treatment and counselling, as well as skills and job training for the future.
The captions to Popa's photographs are excerpts from her interviews with her subjects, the voices of the women portrayed. This is integral to Popa's documentary approach. We rarely see the women's faces - they are too far away, or obscured or hidden from us. But their pain, loneliness and isolation, as well as their bravery and precious camaraderie, are unmistakable, as is the evident sympathy and sensitivity of the artist.
Thinking of the individuals depicted in other works in the exhibition, like Popa's subjects it would appear to be those in poverty-related difficulties who find themselves displaced, illegal, or caught up in exploitative situations.
Illustration ofthis is provided by Ivor Prickett's Quiet before the Storm: Croatia's displaced Serbs. This is a long-term project documenting the experiences of ethnic Serbs who fled their homes during the Croatian war of independence.
Some of Prickett's subjects - generally those who are ill, disabled or elderly - have decided to stay in the transit camps, and thus in a sense to remain displaced. They have become assimilated or institutionalized, and for them the camp is no longer a temporary residence; it has become home. Others have returned to Croatia and reclaimed or rebuilt their homes, a process Prickett documents in the works shown in this exhibition. His hope is to highlight the grant aid available to returnees, and like Popa he has worked alongside NGOs to draw attention to the situation and provoke discussion.
These two artists' work approaches the essence of social photography as an art and documentary form in that it researches social reality and calls for change. To rework Karl Marx, the role of the artist is not simply to depict the world as it is, but to try to change it for the better. This has been a key factor in the selection of this exhibition, though it is more explicit with some artists than with others. Prickett's and Popa's work displays a clear awareness of art's political role in highlighting the harsh realities of a New Europe of struggle and exploitation. They choose to show their photographs in the manner of photo reportage, with text giving meaning to the images and vice versa.
Work such as that of Piruza Khalapyan uses a less explicit style, though hers too relies on captions to clarify the images. Since 2006 she has been photographing one particular family in Armenia. Murtada's Story depicts the marriage between an Armenian woman, Nara, and a Sudanese refugee, Murtada.
Armenia does not have an active immigration policy. The 2001 census classifies 97.8 per cent of the population as ethnic Armenian. It is therefore a virtually mono-ethnic state, with a necessarily low incidence of mixed-race marriage, and very little interaction with other ethnicities. In Yerevan the rarity of visible difference makes it all the more visible. Unfamiliarity breeds mistrust, which leads to prejudice, perpetuated by stereotypes and in the media.
Khalapyan's photographs are mainly set in and around Murtada's and Nara's home. There is a snapshot feel to the images, which captures well the family's daily routine, with Nara in a state of constant activity, and Murtada inactive and frustrated at his enforced idleness. We come to realize that it is race as well as linguistic and cultural barriers that deny him a job and confine him to the home. We find ourselves asking what can possibly be his participation in public life.
Other works in Close to Home employ a less documentary style. Staged for the camera, the films of Sejla Kameric and Gulsun Karamustafa explore in a conceptual way the themes of temporary homes and our response to them. They are both subtle and poetic.
This is particularly true of Kameric' s Dream House. The film shows a refugee transit hut, almost entirely anonymous, with no human presence other than that indicated by the telltale washing line and the satellite dishes on the roof. The building appears frozen in a remote landscape. The location is disguised, the context global; it could be anywhere - in between spaces or in a third space. This 'home' is a temporary place of residence between the past escaped and the future unknown.
Karamustafa's dual-screen projection, The Settler, follows the narrative of two women, one in a rural Muslim setting, the other urban and Christian, either side of a river separating Turkey from Greece and Bulgaria. The women's surroundings are gradually seen to change, and their possessions to disappear, until eventually the women are 'compulsorily exchanged', or forcibly resettled, each finding herself in the other's surroundings, without possessions or it is implied - memories. The film conveys how fundamentally uprooted people can be when they are suddenly made to live in a society different from their own, possibly hostile, certainly alien, and where they must also reckon with the challenges of being in a cultural and religious minority.
The fragile potential of a shared identity across a border is explored in George Georgiou's black and white panoramic triptychs. Georgiou began this work in 2003 when crossing points in Cyprus were opened up, allowing Turkish and Greek Cypriots to communicate with one another directly for the first time since 1974. This enabled Georgiou to explore and document the complex relationship between north and south, and to construct a picture of two communities largely hostile towards one another for decades, but now feeling their way towards a common Cypriot identity.
Daily life is recorded, and the viewer is left to discover similarities as well as differences between the communities of this small, divided island. Georgiou's work on Cyprus forms part of a broader project which, encompassing a number of countries, deals with issues of division and the way people grow up with strong negative feelings towards the 'other'. Some of the images in the exhibition show derelict buildings and gravestones, abandoned when the island was divided.
Yuval Yairi has also depicted abandoned homes in a poetic manner. Their remove from reality is threefold in that images of the houses are reproduced on suitcases which are then photographed in the landscapes from which the inhabitants have fled. The works translate into landscapes the oppression and repression in the history ofthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling to mind images of people leaving their homes, in great haste and with the minimum of possessions. As a child Yairi loved old buildings and used to explore the deserted ruins of Arab houses. He was drawn to their histories, and his work evokes nostalgia for a distant past, while also paying heed to a very troubled recent past and present.
According to The Guardian (26.09.07), approximately one million Eastern Europeans have come to work in Britain since the EU opened up: one of the biggest migrations to Britain in decades. Tabloid-reinforced claims that the country would be 'swamped' and public services stretched beyond capacity have vied with arguments that such migration is essential to a growing economy, and that an intake of doctors and nurses, for instance, is necessary to support the NHS. Meanwhile the countries they have departed may feel the devastation of mass emigration. Challenges are faced by both their new homes and their old.
David Creedon has depicted the effect of emigration on homes left behind, in his case the physical impact on the interiors of Irish homes abandoned between 1949 and 1989 when record numbers of people were driven to leave the country. The scenes presented to us are desolate but not necessarily melancholic, for Creedon shows us a beauty in interiors left slowly to rot, in sumptuous colours, with peeling paints and mouldering neglected possessions. Like Yairi, his work evokes memories of times past.
The underlying thread linking all eight artists is the concept of home, either as a space or place we leave behind and make anew elsewhere, or as a space or place to which we return.
'Home' can of course be interpreted in numerous ways, as Ziauddin Sardar shows in his essay, 'Displaced homes'. But whatever its complexity and slant, our concept of home shapes us and influences our sense of self. It may be intimately connected with land, and must surely be connected with culture. But it is also about seeing space and place as more than context. Even where the associations of home are partly negative - as must be the case for some of Pop a's subjects - one can nevertheless imagine how these could be deemed to relate to specific circumstances, leaving the ideal painfully intact. Previously, home was more closely tied to geographical origin and biological family than need be the case nowadays. In our globalized world we create new families, real and virtual, as nuclear and extended family networks break down.
Thus 'home' could be said to be a state of mind, and the tendency to (re)create home wherever we lay our head just one consequence of our instinct for self-preservation. Large-scale manifestations of this can be seen in cities around the world. In his exchange with Marina Grzinic, 'Zones of Metamorphosis', Richard Appignanesi describes self-contained pockets of culture within host cities, one example being that of a Parisian housing complex that lodges a small Chinese city. Closer to home is the case of Brick Lane, in the Whitechapel area of London, which over the years has hosted a number of different ethnic enclaves, from the Huguenots escaping persecution in seventeenthcentury France, to the Irish in the eighteenth century, to the Jewish emigrants from Eastern Europe, and the early arrivals from Poland. The Bangladeshis are the most visible migrant group today.
In their exchange, Grzinic and Appignanesi characterize differences in Eastern and Western European perspective with regard to history and identity, conflict and inequality, and the position of Europe in relation to the rest of the world, exploring the way some ofthese can manifest themselves in artworks from the former Eastern Europe. The application of the notion 'repetition' is thought-provoking, although in the individuals portrayed in Close to Home, I find I see a remarkable strength and resilience not very readily accounted for in the scheme Grzinic proposes.
As an eye-opener to the realities of migration and minority in and around Europe, and to their material and morally pressing immediacy, the exhibition as a whole urges a redefinition of the terms of being European.
To end, I recall the film Happy Together, which tells the story of two travellers lost in a foreign country. The pair's relationship is already strained, but matters are only made worse by their ordeal, and they separate. A disillusioned Yiu-Fai starts working at a tango bar to save up for his trip home. 'Suddenly I feel like going home. Even though home is far away, at this moment it feels very close.' The film's final scenes are both fascinating and moving. They convey the sense of being apart in a new world, struggling to get home or to discover one's self. Upon reaching his destination, Yiu-Fai feels as though he has woken up from a long sleep ...
HARJEET KAUR
Displaced Homes
Two screens, each showing a richly coloured, elegant interior set against a picture postcard view of pleasant-looking surroundings. And two women. The two halves of Gulsun Karamustafa's film look similar but different; different but similar. But they are more than that. They represent opposite sides of a border across which thousands of 'compulsorily exchanged' persons have been forcibly driven. On one screen, there is 'home'; on the other, 'displacement'.
But what is 'home'? Is it something more than just an address, just the building we inhabit, just the valley that is 'ours', just the country where we were born and live? We speak of home being 'where the heart is', and of 'making a house a home'. What precisely do we mean? And what exactly is 'our common European home'? In exploring the associations of such commonplace expressions, we begin to wrestle with what it is that is displaced in dislocation, and what is invested in making relocation a new home - a 'displaced home'.
We live in a world where displacement and relocation are part and parcel of the experience of more and more people. Does this mean that we are all becoming homeless persons, or is the drive to make a house a home too strong? And what are the implications for society if fewer and fewer people are rooted to the soil of their origins? If we live in a country dominated by displaced homes, what becomes of the sense of community and cohesion, and how are we to bind people together in shared concerns? In short, how do we 'live together', we who come from so many diverse nations, who occupy this space called 'Europe'?
Home is our beginning, a place of origin, the starting point of an identity. Yet place of birth does not necessarily equate with home. But if home is where those we are related to by birth reside, that is no accident. Home is a place of belonging, but much more than belonging to a physical location. And yet the place itself, the spot on the map - that valley - where we begin our terrestrial existence is not a matter of indifference. Within the shifting patterns of complicated lives and displaced homes, place of birth and home are complex distinctions.
How complex? Think of an example such as Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was born in India, where he lived for his first five years before being sent to school in England. He then went back to India where his parents had remained, and worked as a journalist for seven years before returning to England once more, never again to visit India. Kipling's place of birth was no incidental fact of his life. India was the bedrock on which his reputation as a writer is established, an identification inseparable from his creative output and achievement. And yet never was there a more English Englishman, or a man whose identity was more shaped by a historic sense of Englishness, the subject of his later literary output. Kipling belongs to India in a most particular way; and yet despite it all, he was never in any recognizable sense Indian. He is quintessentially displaced in the public mind, if not his own. Displaced too are the families in Ivor Prickett's photographs. Some may eventually become citizens of displaced homes. But as with Kipling, they are unlikely to abandon the sense of their original 'home', even if they settle in a 'home away from home'.
The associations of home are all about origin and identity, beginnings and belongings that are lasting, enduring through generations. Home is an attachment to place that is emotive but consists of far more than love oflandscape and ecology. Home is the receptacle of history, a pattern for living within a culture that is itself shaped by a particular land, the people who have lived on that land and how they have refined their own way of life. Home is the comfort of normality, the place where we learn and develop our normative ideas of what it is to be human, to be part of the associations of human existence: family, neighbourhood, community, clan, tribe, nation, Europe. Home is the hook attaching us to past, present and future. Home is the concept through which we identify ourselves and relate our individuality to people beyond ourselves. If this had not been true in the past for the generations that went before us, it is almost impossible to imagine how Homo sociabilis, the social animal, could exist.
The world does not begin afresh for each new generation. We are born and grow in a family that is our home. But the very nature of our family life is shaped by home-grown identities that are cultural and historical. Culture is the sum total of our learned behaviour. Culture is expressed through the language we learn, the habits and customs we acquire. Culture fashions our history and is simultaneously the birthright and legacy we inherit. The historic experience of our individual culture shapes our outlook on the events of today and our aspirations and vision of the future. Part of the essence of cultural identity is a common mind, a shared repository of ideas.
There is a sense in which the concept of home denies that humanity was ever a wanderer. Home is about stasis, the isolation and exclusiveness of an identity that belongs only to a defined and bounded group of individuals born, raised and spending their lives in one place - one culture as one people, entire and of themselves. And yet it is unlikely that any such people exists anywhere on this earth, or has ever so existed. The reality is that human history is a tale of displaced homes, of human movement, of mutual influence and diffusion, created by the simple fact that people have never stayed still. Humanity has been a wandering, moving, shifting and changing entity throughout history. Yet that is not the image of history we cherish. Our concept of home eradicates much of the reality that was and is human life. Home is an excluding idea, an idea of place and belonging that divides and differentiates us from them.
And yet it need not be so. Home can be and is the positive and negative pole by which we navigate the best and worst of human identity. At best, home inculcates a sense of identity so secure that it has place and space to recognize, respect and extend toleration to everyone, but especially people who do not share our identity. At worst, home is the sense of identity that makes us suspicious, fearful and innately antithetical to anyone who is not just like us. And home is the continuum between these alternate poles of being.
The yearning for home is, not surprisingly, encrusted with ideas of sacredness, a spiritual attachment to place, to people and to history that can elevate human understanding of self and others, or be distorted into hatred of others. The monotheistic religions all teach and encourage the sacredness of home. Ultimately, they teach that it is God who is humanity's true home; and our homing instinct and its cultural expressions are the reflections and signs that lead or should lead to a better appreciation of the divine. Yet down the ages such expansive ideas, which should inspire tolerance of others, have been resolved into the dictates of 'God on my side, but not on anyone else's'. This is, of course, equally true of other notions, such as 'my nation right or wrong', or 'my territory, my place', that have no place for others of a different faith, culture or ethnicity. Displacement of the meaning of home can be as pernicious a condition as physical displacement from a terrestrial home.
Our sense of home, of belonging, may be where we all begin, but the imperatives of making a living, or the consequences of events, can have a great bearing on where we actually spend the rest of our days. We live in a world shaped as much by displacement as it has been identified with homes. The 'memory suitcase' ofYuval Yairi's series represents our perennial condition. We take with us a suitcase stuffed with memories of home when we go out in search of employment, education, or a better life, or simply a more peaceful place to be. New opportunities, new discoveries, ecological changes wrought by nature or human activity, shifts of power and disagreements within and between cultures, peoples and nations that are the rumours of wars and effects of wars, have all made displacement a permanent feature of human existence. By choice and the exigencies of circumstance, people have always been on the move from home in search of a new home. Displacement has constructed human history as much as have the sense of home and the identity it fixes within people.
How do people cope with displacement? How shall we count the innumerable ways in which it works on people and their sense of identity? How do displaced people survive? Piruza Khalapyan's photographs hint at the difficulties in adjusting experienced by Murtada, a Sudanese immigrant into Armenia. But when the dust settles, the displaced try to make a home just like the rest of us.
At best, displacement is the positive agent of constructive change, introducing impetus and ideas that enable new developments to emerge. Displacement can bring in its wake the gradual diffusion from which synthesis can be fashioned. People taking new industries, new technologies and ideas to the place where they settle have furthered development and promoted the wellbeing and enrichment of those places. Synthesis can be seamless; it can look and feel like the inevitable evolution of what was, forgetting what it owes to what has been introduced from outside, brought in by displacement. At worst, displacement produces the penetrative oppression of one people overwriting the existence, identity and home of another. The colonial imperialist imperative has been at work down the millennia of human history. Indeed, archaeologists long conceived of human history as the total eradication of one group of people by displaced incomers. Displacement is defined by the sense of home travellers and settlers take with them, the scale and numbers in which they move, and how they set about the business of remaking their displaced homes wherever they come to rest.
Home and displacement are architects that between them have made human history and continue to construct the world in which we live. Yet we harbour very different attitudes to these concepts. What is warm, consoling and comforting about home is vaunted, while we look with disfavour on the rupture and challenges that always accompany displacement. How can displaced persons fit into a new location, a new culture, a new nation? They make their adjustment by and through the sense of home they bring with them. It is the human impulse to make a house a home that travels with the displaced. Home is so embedded in our sense of self that the most natural consequence of displacement is to seek out or reconstruct elements of familiarity, and to recreate the means to perform the customs and rituals of one's cultural identity in a new land. The history of the world is replete with positive and negative examples of how the homing instinct has operated in the process of relocation.
So it is incumbent on us to remember that the history of the European peoples begins with the recreation of displaced homes. The Franks, Huns, Alans and Goths - the peoples who became the Europeans - all were displaced out of Asia in historic times, and through relocation and synthesis fashioned modern national identities, even as they overwrote, included or superseded earlier identities home-grown in Europe. European history also demonstrates how rapidly a displaced home becomes the only home of a relocated people. Jutes, Angles and Saxons made their way as displaced peoples from Northern Europe to Britain, and there founded a new identity: a new, home-grown sense of being Anglo-Saxon. Other groups from Northern Europe settled in France to become Normans. When the Normans crossed the English Channel under William the Conqueror, two identities, from common stock and each forged in displaced homes, came into direct conflict - and together have fused into the history of Britain.
European nations know a great deal about displaced homes. The history of the modern world has been shaped by the displaced homes Europeans carved out for themselves across the globe. The colonial ex-patriot mindset provides an archetype of the displaced home. Colonists took their culture and way oflife with them, and recreated them - as well as they could and with such amendments as were acceptable to them - wherever they went. The history of Europe holds many negative lessons about the harm displaced homes can cause, about the tensions and injustices in the power relations produced by the displacement and relocation of people. And yet, examined in a different light, Europe has a wealth of experience on which to draw to find the positive, accommodating and creative possibilities of the displaced homes built within its bounds.
Home tugs at all the heartstrings that make us human. Yet if the tug of home is also an intimation ofthe divine in each and everyone of us, then it is a call to something much greater and beyond ourselves. We have the choice to look and think of home in ways that enable mutual respect, and cohesion, acceptance, tolerance and synthesis of the multiple or plural ideas of home that exist in today's Europe. The mass movement of people across the new and extended European community can be the beginning of new, diverse and more innovative ideas of what it means to be European today.
We also face the challenge of withstanding the growing sense of displacement that is a consequence of an ever more mobile population. More and more people are faced with the task of making displaced homes for themselves in faceless cities where all sense of neighbourhood and community has evaporated. After a working life of engagement in community and place, more and more people across Europe opt for private dreams of
a good life in displaced homes by the sea or in the countryside, preferring to end their days without the comforts of family and community around them.
We have much to consider when we think of home. What being at home or in a displaced home actually means is not selfevident and given; it is a consciousness - a moral challenge we have to address. We have to choose whether and how we will make Europe home for all who live and come to live here. This is what this exhibition points towards. How we choose will define the future of Europe.
ZIAUDDIN SARDAR