Activist, artist, independent scholar and former asylum seeker Vukašin Nedeljković have their first RHA exhibition of elements from their multidisciplinary testimonial project Asylum Archive. Having studied Photography at Belgrade’s Academy of Arts, and with a MA in Visual Arts from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art Design and Technology, Nedeljković has dedicated almost 14 years to creating their archive of “asylum”, Direct Provision and Emergency Accommodation in Ireland, providing an insight into the treatment of people who have come to Ireland to seek protection.
Concerned with the reality of life for asylum seekers, Asylum Archive’s objective is to collaborate with asylum seekers, artists, academics, civil society activists and others, to create an interactive, documentary, cross-platform, online resource which critically foregrounds accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory.
In Nedeljković’s photographic testimony, no bodies of asylum seekers are presented; instead, they focus on the architecture of confinement, traces, remnants and ghosts.
Their latest work includes a focus on Emergency Accommodation Centres. The exhibition also references the latest White Paper on Direct Provision, and commemorates the unknown numbers of people who have died within the system.
A second edition of Nedeljković’s book Asylum Archive featuring both photographs and essays, is also being published, and will be launched during the exhibition.
Nedeljković says of the forthcoming exhibition, “The exhibition in RHA will offer an awareness of the inhumane Direct Provision and Emergency Accommodation dispersal system in Ireland. I know that the exhibition in RHA will attract new and diverse audiences.”
Until December 19
Our 2019 feature on the project is here:
