Nowhere People shines light on plight of the stateless
Handprints on the walls of an abandoned school, the view from inside a crumbling hut, and the wrinkled hands of an old woman holding a pair of glasses and her expired passport are just some of the haunting images included in Nowhere People, a photo exhibit on display at The Atrium in the Department of Justice till 19 July.
The exhibit, sponsored by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is the product of an award-winning project by American photographer Greg Constantine to document the world’s stateless people since 2005.
According to the UNHCR, there are nearly 12 million people around the world who are classified as ‘stateless’. They do not have a legal national identity, and many are denied basic human rights.
Constantine’s work reflects the concept of stolen identity. In one image from a rural village in Bangladesh, an Urdu-speaking 75-year-old refugee is photographed alone in a pool of light, his outline illuminated but his face hidden in shadows. The memory of this man will never leave Constantine, he says.
“A lot of stateless people are really lost in the shadows. Through these images, I can help show how statelessness affects people in their daily lives.”
Constantine travelled back to Bangladesh two years after photographing the villager to give him a copy of the image.
Members of the Rohingya community, one of the many stateless groups represented in the photographs, were also at the launch of the exhibit. Mohamed Rafique, 30, expressed his hope that the exhibit will rally the international community to put a stop to oppression against his people.
“How many years will the Rohingya people be stateless?” he said. “I hope [viewers of the exhibit] will see the real situation of the Rohingya people.”
Variations of the exhibit have been shown around the world, including at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Reaching a high-level audience with the power to spark change is exactly the hope of Constantine for his images.
“This is about making an invisible condition visible,” he said.
