Exhibition traces the lives of a Syrian family
IN What Language Do We Dream? is the umbrella title of an exhibition of photographs, a newspaper and a video tracing the post war lives of a Syrian refugee family at Gallery Oldham.
Ostensibly a collection of family pictures, they are made, largely, by two individuals, the British documentary photographer Rich Wiles and Ruba al-hindawi with members of her family.
They fled for their lives from Homs in 2012 in the wake of the nation’s civil war which began a year earlier, displacing some 6.6 million people.
After five years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, the British government gave them the legal right to settle in England in 2017.
The images we see were mostly created since 2019. The gallery hung photographs are numbered, there are no titles or labels.
There is one laminated list of photographs displayed in the exhibition to consult which has a description alongside the odd image, sometimes in English and Arabic, sometimes only in English, sometimes only in Arabic.
Is the latter to encourage gallery goers to experience the impenetrable appearance of an unrecognisable script in a ploy to imagine how difficult it is for the Syrian family to comprehend the Roman script, the written form of English?
One image portrays Rami, the father of the four children and two adult family taking a smartphone family selfie
made to send to relatives, in other countries, and to friends.
In the same image, number 47, on the table, in the foreground, there is a remote control, presumably for a television, an ashtray, a coffee cup, a lighter and a packet of 20 cigarettes.
Photograph number 65 shows the family celebrating a birthday; here they are captured blowing out candles on their cake, many of the subjects with puffed up cheeks as they do so. They share amongst themselves a range of foods including: kubba, warak dwali, tabbouleh - all Arabic foodstuffs - mini pizzas and fairy cakes.
Refugees celebrate birthdays, amongst other family landmarks, as most other people do. There are a range of approaches to the images created, from the formal portrait, more August Sander than the contentious Diane Arbus, to the rapidly captured, leaving one of the subjects blurred, the other in focus.
The lives of refugees, both legal and illegal, have exercised the minds of many, from the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, to demonstrators in Liverpool, making this display both personal to its creators and political to others.
In answer to the question posed at the beginning, linguists are believed to dream in their second language. It takes ten years of full immersion in a second language to become fluent though this requires fluency in your first language.
The exhibition was first held at the Impressions Gallery, Bradford and runs at Gallery Oldham until May 11, 2024.