'Art offers a poetic way of looking at something so horrid'
Artist Indrė Šerpytytė's new work for IWM, Constellations, represents various refugee journeys across the Mediterranean in abstract neon lights. The collections of lines and circles denote the stops and starts of individual refugee's journeys, but also allude to a universal language of astronomy.
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“My name is Indrė Šerpytytė, I’m an artist based in London. I’m originally from Lithuania. My work is multidisciplinary; my practice looks at history, time, memory, and culture. For this project with Imperial War Museum’s Refugees: Forced to Flee, I am creating a work named Constellations.
When I was invited to respond to the theme I actually already worked, been working on this work for a few years and I just really was touched by the media and the reports. I just felt like I needed to say something, you know, to add and I think the thing is when you read the news you at the beginning you might relate to it and after a while you know the news becomes news and as an artist, where you can create this something more long lasting you know and really draw attention to it on a much more personal, poetic way so I just felt like there needed to be a voice or, you know, something for these people.
For a lot of research, I found maps of refugees that travel from usually Syria to UK or European countries and the research was done by the Warwick University. So, I used their research and then mappings to create this work, which is Constellations.
Taking their maps as a starting point and looking at the constellation maps and the star maps, I decided that the relationship between those two and the light and the kind of what you follow is a light and there's a hope in the end in some way, you know, so I wanted the work to be hopeful. And I decided to use neons as that, you know, so that although it's a very heavy subject of humans fleeing their homes, fleeing their family, leaving everything behind and going to unknown, in some way it's also they're looking for a new hope. Art offers time to reflect, time to really think; it's a much more poetic way of looking at something which is so horrid. I mean, I think it was Susan Sontag who said you know if you look too much to images of pain and destruction you kind of become immune to it, and I think what art is able to do is through its beauty and his abstraction to touch on these subjects in a very different way, in a much more long lasting way, and in some way to create a monument, in this case for the refugees.
When people come to the show, I really would like them to think about the individual also because I think we have read so many stories and newspapers and, you know, about the mass of people that immigrate so we always really think about the numbers as that but in this work I really want to think about the individual and the individual's struggles and the story. And the stories I’m looking at they did manage to reach their destination, I hope that in the show that reflects, although there's a lot of sadness but there's also hopefully hope in the end.”
Each route is taken from Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat, a research project led by Professor Vicki Squite with colleagues at the University of Warwick and University of Malta and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
Digital technology has changed the way we travel and communicate, but the stars remain a key navigation tool on refugee journeys. In 2016, a CNN report recorded a smuggler telling refugees, “See those stars. They mean North. Follow them.” For Šerpytytė, the stars represent both a practical tool and a symbol of hope.
Constellations was on display at IWM London as part of Refugees: Forced to Flee.
