Roland Fischer: Refugees

Few current political issues are as powerful or as emotionally charged as the question of refugees and their rights and status. That issue, and the varied ways that people and politicians have responded to it, inspired artist Roland Fischer, after working on his previous publications Façades and Tel Aviv, to create a collective portrait of refugees that simultaneously shows the massive scale of the issue and turns the abstract concept of “refugee” into images of actual people whose faces, and need, cannot be so easily ignored. The more than one thousand separate photographs of individual refugees that make up Fischer’s work are a stark reminder that each refugee is an individual, with a life, a story, and hopes and fears for the future. The publication reproduces the complete oversized art works, as well as a selection of the individual portraits. No one who confronts this artwork will be able to hear media reports on refugees in the same way ever again. This is a highly topical piece of contemporary art on an exciting topic of sociopolitical debate.