Samet DurgunPhotographer
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Artists Working on Refugees, Forced Migration and Asylum

Journal · Field guide

A field guide to filmmakers, writers, sound artists, performers and sculptors working on refugees, forced migration and asylum — where Come Get Your Honey sits among them, and where it departs from them.

Photography already has its own field guide on this site, published a few days before this one. This one covers what’s left: film, literature, sound, theatre and puppetry, sculpture and installation, held to the same rule — refugees, asylum and forced displacement specifically, not migration in general. I built it the way I built the last one: institution pages, prize records and the artists’ own words, each claim checked against at least two of them. I’ve left out the canonical migration-broadly work — Nil Yalter, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah, Michael Rakowitz, Tania Bruguera’s own Immigrant Movement International — because blurring that line is exactly what this site refuses to do. The map below leans toward artists who circulate through European and North American institutions; that’s a weighting, not a claim about who the major artists are worldwide. I don’t know most of the people in it personally. It’s a map built from watching the field, the same way the last one was.

At a glance

Artist Based Key work The form
Abdulrazak Gurnah Canterbury, UK By the Sea (2001) Literature
Viet Thanh Nguyen Los Angeles The Refugees (2017) Literature
Dina Nayeri University of St Andrews The Ungrateful Refugee (2019) Literature
Aeham Ahmad Germany Und die Vögel werden singen (2017) Music, memoir
Mounira Al Solh Beirut / Amsterdam I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous Installation, drawing, sound
Samet Durgun Berlin Come Get Your Honey Photography
Hassan Fazili and family Germany Midnight Traveler (2019) Film
Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed Leipzig Purple Sea (2020) Film
Abou Bakar Sidibé, with Moritz Siebert and Estephan Wagner Mali (born) Those Who Jump (2016) Film
Behrouz Boochani New Zealand No Friend but the Mountains (2018) Literature
Basel Zaraa, with Tania El Khoury UK As Far As My Fingertips Take Me (2016) Sound, performance, installation
Exil Ensemble, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin The ensemble itself (2016– ) Theatre
Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Amin Nawabi Denmark Flee (2021) Film, animation
Faraz Shariat Germany Futur Drei (2020) Film
Bouchra Khalili Vienna The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11) Video
Doris Salcedo Bogotá Palimpsest (2013–17) Sculpture, installation
Ai Weiwei Portugal Law of the Journey (2017) Sculpture, installation, film
Banu Cennetoğlu Istanbul The List (since 2007) Public installation, print
Lawrence Abu Hamdan Beirut Earwitness Theatre (2018) Sound
Hiwa K Berlin / Sulaymaniyah View From Above (2017) Video, performance
Forensic Architecture London Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe (2020) Research, moving image
Tania Bruguera Cambridge, Massachusetts 10,142,926 (2018–19) Performance, installation
Halil Altındere Istanbul Homeland (2016) Video
Good Chance — Amir Nizar Zuabi, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson London The Walk / Little Amal (2021) Puppetry, theatre
Jenny Erpenbeck Berlin Go, Went, Gone (2015) Literature
Christoph Büchel Iceland Barca Nostra (2018–19) Installation

Beginning after arrival

The refugee as a person with a before and an after, rather than someone permanently arriving.

Abdulrazak Gurnah Canterbury, UK
Arrived in England as a refugee from Zanzibar at the end of the 1960s, per the Swedish Academy — the University of Kent calls Canterbury "his exile and home." *By the Sea* (2001) treats asylum as one moment; the decades after it — language, racism, memory, strategic silence — are the actual subject. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021.
Viet Thanh Nguyen Los Angeles
In his own words, "I am a refugee, an American, and a human being" — he came to the US as a refugee in 1975. *The Refugees* (2017) and *The Sympathizer*, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, put refugee life in ordinary rooms — marriage, parents, resentment — where the category stays real without swallowing the characters. One story follows a young refugee resettled with two gay men in San Francisco.
Dina Nayeri University of St Andrews
She "lived as a refugee for two years before being granted asylum in the United States," her publisher's account states: out of Iran at eight, into a refugee camp in a former hotel outside Rome, then Oklahoma. *The Ungrateful Refugee* (2019) argues that asylum tribunals are a storytelling test — built around linear Western narration, they read other ways of telling as lies. It won the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 2020; she teaches creative writing at St Andrews now.
Aeham Ahmad Germany
Grew up, in his own words, "as a Palestinian refugee" in the Yarmouk camp in Damascus, playing piano on a trailer through the siege. When his piano was destroyed in 2015 he fled to Germany. *Und die Vögel werden singen* (2017; English: *The Pianist of Yarmouk*, 2019) is the memoir of that route. He won the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights that December.
Mounira Al Solh Beirut / Amsterdam
I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous, begun in 2012 and still ongoing, grew out of direct conversations with people forced to leave Syria and, later, people displaced elsewhere. Many of the portraits are drawn on yellow legal paper, the bureaucratic form showing at the edge. Shown at documenta 14 in 2017; her first US solo museum exhibition came the following year, in Chicago.
Samet Durgun Berlin
Come Get Your Honey shares the arc without sharing the condition — I'm an immigrant, not a refugee or an asylum seeker, and the work was made in Berlin, after arrival, out of friendships rather than assignments. What sets it apart is that its subject is specifically queer life, and that it's the one still camera in this guide — everyone else here works in film, sound, sculpture or performance.

Holding it themselves

The phone, the waterproof camera, the smuggled message — the apparatus inside the experience rather than arriving from outside it.

Hassan Fazili and family Germany
Filmed their own attempt to reach safety on cell phones; Hassan Fazili, Fatima Hussaini, Nargis Fazili and Zahra Fazili share the cinematography credit on *Midnight Traveler* (2019). The family arrived in Germany in April 2018 and applied for asylum, Fazili's own account states. It won the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award in 2019 and played Berlinale Panorama the same year.
Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed Leipzig
A waterproof camera attached to her wrist recorded the sinking of the boat she was on, off Lesvos, on 28 October 2015. That same footage underlies Forensic Architecture's reconstruction of the wreck and *Purple Sea* (2020), the film she made afterward with Khaled Abdulwahed. It premiered at Berlinale Forum Expanded in 2020. Institutions describe her as a survivor; nothing here assigns her any further legal category.
Abou Bakar Sidibé, with Moritz Siebert and Estephan Wagner Mali
Sidibé, a Malian man attempting to reach Melilla, operated the camera and holds a co-director and cinematographer credit on *Les Sauteurs / Those Who Jump* (2016), filmed on Mount Gurugu. The producer, Final Cut for Real, uses the word "migrant" for him and for the population on the mountain; the film won the Ecumenical Jury prize at Berlinale Forum in 2016. His current whereabouts aren't reported here.
Behrouz Boochani New Zealand
Wrote *No Friend but the Mountains* (2018) message by message on a smuggled phone, in Farsi, while held in Australian detention on Manus Island after seeking asylum in 2013. Omid Tofighian translated it; the book took the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2019. New Zealand recognised him as a refugee in July 2020, and he lives there now.
Basel Zaraa, with Tania El Khoury UK
Born and raised, in his own words, "a refugee in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp" in Damascus. *As Far As My Fingertips Take Me* (2016), made with Tania El Khoury, puts one visitor at a time on the other side of a gallery wall, an arm through a hole, singing about his sisters' journey from Damascus to Sweden while a fingerprint scanner runs. *Dear Laila* (2022) rebuilds his childhood home in miniature, for his daughter.
Exil Ensemble, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin
Since November 2016, performers living in exile from Syria, Palestine and Afghanistan have worked as a resident company inside a state theatre. Shermin Langhoff founded it; Ayham Majid Agha led it as chief director for its first two years. Her reasoning, reported in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Flüchtling ist ja kein Beruf" — refugee is not a profession. Four members joined the Gorki's permanent ensemble from 2019.

Queer forced migration

Jonas Poher Rasmussen and Amin Nawabi Denmark
Flee (2021) follows Amin Nawabi — a pseudonym that protects him — as he prepares to marry his long-time boyfriend, animation standing in for scenes he still won't show directly. He arrived in Denmark from Afghanistan as an unaccompanied minor, and is credited as co-writer alongside Jonas Poher Rasmussen. It won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2021 and drew three Academy Award nominations.
Faraz Shariat Germany
Futur Drei (2020) puts a German-born son of Iranian parents, second-generation and not an asylum seeker, into a relationship with a young man who fled Iran with his sister — her precarious status part of the plot. Shariat has called it autobiographical: he did community service at a refugee shelter at nineteen or twenty. Made with the Jünglinge collective; it won the Teddy Award for best feature at Berlinale 2020.

Withholding the face

The most consistent formal move in the field, and it cuts across every discipline: names, hands, figures, a list — anything but the face. I went the other way.

Bouchra Khalili Vienna
The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11) shows only a hand tracing a route in marker; faces stay off camera throughout. In her words, the method is "long conversations, during which I do not ask questions but rather listen," letting people "take possession of their own voice." MoMA, which holds the work, describes the subjects as people "forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally" — refugees and migrants both.
Doris Salcedo Bogotá
Palimpsest (2013–17) surfaces the names of people who drowned crossing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic through water welling up between stone slabs, then lets it recede — no bodies, only the visitor walking across it. The Museo Reina Sofía calls them people who "died while fleeing"; the Fondation Beyeler calls them "refugees and migrants." Salcedo, the inaugural Nasher Prize laureate, makes no claim about herself here.
Ai Weiwei Portugal
Law of the Journey (2017) is an inflatable boat crowded with 258 faceless figures, Lisson Gallery's count — the National Gallery Prague, which first showed it in a hall once used as a wartime deportation assembly point, says "over 300." *Human Flow* (2017), his documentary on displacement, surveyed more than 23 countries. He isn't a refugee himself, and this guide doesn't call him one; his gallery lists him as based in Portugal now.
Banu Cennetoğlu Istanbul
Since 2007 she has facilitated the publication of *The List* — UNITED for Intercultural Action's record of more than 34,000 deaths linked to Europe's border regime — as newspapers, billboards and public screens rather than gallery objects. Shown at the Liverpool Biennial in 2018, produced with Chisenhale Gallery, and distributed as a Guardian supplement that June. The names carry the fact; nothing here says anything about Cennetoğlu's own identity.

Turning the apparatus on itself

The interview, the surveillance feed, the dataset, the prison’s acoustics — the machinery of asylum as the subject.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan Beirut
Survivors of the Saydnaya prison in Syria knew it almost entirely by ear, kept in darkness or blindfolded; *Saydnaya (the missing 19db)* (2017) and *Earwitness Theatre* (2018) convert that acoustic memory into evidence, growing out of a 2016 investigation with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture. The Earwitness Inventory holds 95 objects. He shared the 2019 Turner Prize with Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani, at the four artists' own request.
Hiwa K Berlin / Sulaymaniyah
View From Above (2017) follows a character who memorises a map of a city from above to prove, in an asylum interview, that he comes from an unsafe zone — succeeding where people actually from the city fail, because the official's own knowledge is aerial too. Made for documenta 14, alongside *Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue)*, which restages an on-foot route with a pole of motorbike mirrors. In his own words: "I do not say this was my journey. It is important to keep it that way."
Forensic Architecture London
Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe (2020), commissioned by Alzakout, cross-references her wrist-camera footage with Greek coastguard video, Richard Mosse's thermal imagery and weather data to reconstruct the sinking off Lesvos and dispute the official account of the rescue. Published 19 February 2020 by the research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, and shown at Berlinale Forum Expanded alongside *Purple Sea*.
Tania Bruguera Cambridge, Massachusetts
10,142,926 (2018–19), the Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern, took its title, per Tate, from two migrant figures — the previous year's country-to-country migrants plus that year's recorded migrant deaths — stamped in red ink on visitors' hands and rising daily. A heat-sensitive floor concealed a portrait, revealed only by the body heat of people lying down together; Tate names its subject only as Yousef, "a Syrian migrant from Homs" per Frieze. Bruguera left Cuba for Harvard in 2021 and makes no claim to any of this herself.
Halil Altındere Istanbul
Homeland (2016) stages the refugee route as a music video, drones and near-indistinguishable real and staged footage used on purpose rather than smuggled in. Mohammad Abu Hajar, described by the Berlin Biennale as a Syrian rapper living in Berlin, wrote and performs the lyrics. Commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale in 2016; it's now in MoMA's collection.

From outside, and saying so

Naming this as outside work is what makes the insider claims above credible — and one entry here still crosses a line the rest of this guide stays behind.

Good Chance — Amir Nizar Zuabi, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson London
The Walk (2021) sent a 3.5-metre puppet of a child, built by Handspring Puppet Company under artistic director Amir Nizar Zuabi, some 8,000 km from the Syria–Turkey border to Manchester. Zuabi's own stated purpose: "to highlight the potential of the refugee, not just their dire circumstances." Reception ranged wide — in Larissa, Greece, demonstrators pelted her with stones. Good Chance, founded by Murphy and Robertson in 2015, built its first theatre inside the Calais camp; *The Jungle* (2017) later seated its audience inside a reconstructed Afghan café.
Jenny Erpenbeck Berlin
Go, Went, Gone (2015; English 2017, tr. Susan Bernofsky) follows a retired classics professor who meets asylum seekers camped in a Berlin square — the German original places it at Oranienplatz. The book doesn't solve the outsider problem; it makes the encounter its structure. Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin in 1967, makes no claim to any part of this experience herself.
Christoph Büchel Iceland
Barca Nostra (2018–19) is the actual salvaged wreck of the boat that sank off Libya on 18 April 2015 — the Venice Biennale gives 28 survivors and between 700 and 1,100 presumed missing — shown unlabelled near a café at the 2019 Biennale. The institutions involved call the dead "migrants"; whether they were also refugees isn't settled, and this entry doesn't resolve it. The wreck returned to Sicily in 2021, more than a year past the loan.

Where mine sits

Within the after-arrival group, I think I’m the only one whose central subject is queer life specifically, and the only one in this whole guide still holding a still camera — which is why it stands apart rather than simply belonging. Thematically it sits nearest to Flee and to Futur Drei; formally nearest to Al Solh’s conversations. It’s clearly unlike Midnight Traveler and Purple Sea, where the person filming was also the person in danger — I held the camera, and the relationship came first. I am not a refugee, and I am not an asylum seeker: a first-generation immigrant in Germany, direct field rather than the condition most of this guide is about. I don’t know most of the people above personally — I’ve watched this field, not lived inside anyone else’s part of it.

The series is here. The photography field guide, where my own medium actually belongs, is here. The wider field is here.

Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where an artist has their own site, their name links to it.

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