Institute Library Offers Sanctuary

You don’t need to know the backstory to feel the effect. The story is in the girl’s eyes, in her body language. She has too many emotions in her face for someone so young; she has seen too much already. She’s a refugee — maybe from Syria, maybe from Afghanistan — and photographer Marc Hors took her picture when he visited the camp in Athens where she was living at the time. Hors’s images from that camp are the center of ​“Finding Home: A Campaign for Sanctuary,” running now at the Institute Library on Chapel Street until March 14. The exhibit, curated by Stephen Kobasa, seeks to move the needle toward New Haven declaring itself officially a sanctuary city, by appealing to the head and the heart.

Such an appeal finds a welcome audience in the Elm City. Being open and friendly to immigration has been a general part of New Haven’s city policy for decades, thanks to a strong activist community and sympathetic municipal government. In January, Mayor Elicker made it a part of his plan for his first 100 days in office to both keep in place former Mayor Toni Harp’s sanctuary city executive order and move the Board of Alders toward adopting more permanent laws strengthening protections for immigrants. In that context, the Institute Library’s exhibit is less a protest and more of a show of support, and a reminder of the human realities behind the policy talk.

Several of the artists contribute pieces that would not — and perhaps did not — look out of place at one of the rallies on the New Haven Green in support of the city’s sanctuary policies. Margaret Roleke’s signage deploys the Statue of Liberty. Paul Bloom’s features a bustling rally in New York. Robert Brush’s reminds us of sanctuary’s long history by nearly evoking the Hunchback of Notre Dame. In Joy Bush’s sign, it’s even possible to feel the hope amid the outrage.

Jason Noushin’s arresting Fesenjoon deploys hieroglyphs and a deer skull to create an effect that, in the context of this exhibit, has some teeth. It draws the viewer in and unsettles. Is the sculpture offering its own head? Or has it already lost it and found something else? The elaborate symbols on the sculpture’s back, meanwhile, remind us of the cultural devastation, particularly in the Middle East, that has been a hallmark of the conflicts that created the current refugee crisis in the first place.

Marc Hors’s photographs, meanwhile, remind us in a profound way what all the policies are for. The images in his series, called Portraits of Dignity, were taken in Ellinikon, a refugee camp housing 1,500 people from Syria and Afghanistan as they awaited official political asylum from the European Union. The faces of the people in the images speak for themselves. Hors’s accompanying stories lend the pictures even greater depth.

He began by photographing children. ​“I’m able to print those first smiles in 4x6 format, and I arrive the next day to give them each a picture of themselves, one by one,” Hors explains in his statement of his experience at the camp. ​“Asal comes running, screaming with a frown and snatches her photo. She looks at it carefully, she doesn’t smile like the others, she doesn’t scream out loud like the others, only with a very subtle gesture she asks, ​‘who is she?’”

“Two days later, a tall and large man approaches me,” Hors continues. ​“He is Badih, the father of Asal. With gestures, he invites me into his tent, filled with covers, clothes and some toys. In an improvised altar, the photo of Asal. After sharing tea, he asks me to photograph him with his children. During the next three weeks, boys and girls, fathers and mothers, cousins, nieces, nephews, and grandparents pose in front of the camera in their best clothing, hijabs, hairstyles, and clothing donated from the remote areas of the world, made of cloths and colors foreign to their culture.”

As Hors himself describes his project, the photos ​“reveal the essential humanity of refugees as they flee the horrors of war and adjust to new cultures.” And just as Hors built trust with his subjects and made them active participants in his photography project, maybe welcoming immigrants with open arms to the Elm City, and then giving them chances to have active roles in civic life, can create a stronger New Haven.

“Finding Home” runs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., through March 14. Visit the library’s website for hours and more information.