The Seamed Zones (Private View)

THE SEAMED ZONES: The Everyday Life of Immigration Removal Centres in the United Kingdom

Photographs by Robert Stothard
Curated by Nicole Sansone
5 October - 30 October 2017

** Private View on 12 October 1800-2100 with speakers from Detention Action, and Freed Voices **

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This is an exhibition that can be seen in many different ways. For one, it is an exhibition of landscape photography. The photos meditate on the ways in which classically imperial tropes of English countryside have transformed into a new aesthetic, now marked in part by barbed wire and CCTV cameras.

Seen another way, the exhibition is photographic documentation of the geography of fascism. The way these images gesture towards "beautiful" landscapes emphasises, at the same time as it belies, a peculiarly modern-day form of governance enacted through affect: spaces that yield power to discretion; the omnipresent threat of danger; borders that ambiguously define the "illegal" in negative relation to the "legal."

In all cases, this is an exhibition that thinks about how art can speak truth to power. The institution of immigration can manifest as as boring as the landscape that conceals it, as potent as the landscape that fortifies it. "The Seamed Zones" offers a block to such operations, making visible the sites and processes intended to be hidden in plain sight.

The photographs on display are part of a larger project produced by Robert Stothard. An accompanying publication titled "Removal: A Short Guide to the United Kingdom’s Immigration Detention Estate" and written with Silvia Mollicchi, will be available on-site for free. This publication includes, psychosocial mapping, and official reports documenting the location and conditions of UK immigration removal centres, reporting centres and other sites of detention.