Exhibition tells real stories of refugees
She doesn’t look like a terrorist most likely because she isn’t one.
But new Green MP Golriz Ghahraman falls into a group of people often mistaken for them. She is a refugee.
It was a year before her rise in New Zealand politics that Alistair Guthrie photographed her.
That photograph and others are on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Wellington in a 10-day exhibition aimed at dispelling myths around refugees.
Ghahraman - who arrived in New Zealand with her parents at the age of 10 as an asylum seeker from Iran, before going on to become an Oxford-educated human rights lawyer and, eventually, an MP - indeed has a remarkable story.
But curator Tracey Barnett can look around the walls of Transplanted: Refugee Portraits of New Zealand and rattle off many more stories.
She points to two refugees who became nominees for the New Zealand Women of Influence awards, or the Jewish concentration camp survivor who became a leading Order of Meritwinning lawyer of 57 years.
She points to a series of photos of Myanmar refugees who are new to New Zealand. The father was in a refugee camp on the Thailand border for a decade, where he met the mother.
Each of their three children was born in the camp before coming to New Zealand just seven months ago.
Barnett tells the story of going to see the family and taking pens and pencils for the children.
‘‘I thought they were going to draw me a nice picture, but all they wanted was ‘write your name, write your name’,’’ she said.
Those children were just excited to be able to go to school. By doing just that they would be doing something their father never got to do.
Each weekend of the exhibition - at 1pm each day last weekend and this one coming - refugees including holocaust survivors and others from the likes of Rwanda, Burma, and Colombia are there to talk to people.
Also included in events in the exhibition, which ends on Monday morning, is a panel discussion featuring Ghahraman, at 6pm today called I Am Not A Label: Young Refugee Voices.