The Drawing Together Exhibition - Making Refugee Youths´ Voices Matter

Children & youth

Jan 11

Who: Norce

What: An exhibiton

Where: Bergen, Western Regional Centre for children and youth mental health and child welfare/ NORCE research

Project period: 2023

Web: Norce

Collaborating with young refugees to voice their experiences through an art exhibition.

In 2023, Norce will organize an exhibition to showcase personal artworks that young refugees created in a series of art workshops. The art pieces tell stories of flight over land and sea, people who make a difference in the community and connections with family and the homeland. Others speak of hopes and plans for the future, as well as aspirations to “giving back”. Memories of childhood relationships and places are also illuminated, as young people look back from the point of view of life in exile. Visitors to the exhibition will witness both the extraordinary and ordinary, what is unique and what is shared. We invite policymakers, communities, and institutions to listen and observe, as well as to share their thoughts on how we can build inclusive and sustainable societies for all.

The exhibition will take place at Kunstgarasjen and artist Christine Hoem will curata. The Norwegian team also includes three researchers, Marte Knag Fylkesnes, Masego Katisi and Milfrid Tonheim.

The exhibition is part of an international NORDFORSK funded research project: Drawing Together. Relational wellbeing in the lives of young refugees in Finland, Norway, and Scotland. Previous research has mostly focused on challenges young refugees face through the asylum trajectory and first phases of integration, including how asylum, health and social services meet their complex needs. Our ambition is to move beyond narratives of need and illuminate how young people develop a sense of wellbeing for themselves and the people that are important to them over time; locally and transnationally. Through research and art, we address the question of how wellbeing is aspired for, emerges, and is sustained in the space between refugee young people and their valued people. Narratives of vulnerability and exclusion are not silenced, but illuminated alongside hard work, hospitality, aspirations for "a good life" and so on.