Powerful new mural highlights intersections between disability and asylum seeking

Easton Community Centre welcomed visitors to the official opening of a powerful artistic collaboration between activists, academics and community members with lived experiences of asylum seeking and disability.

A vibrant mural with an evocative political message now spans the exterior walls of the community hub on Kilburn Street in Easton.

It is the result of the curation of messages and images conveyed by deaf and disabled activists, disabled students and academics, homeless people and refugees and asylum seekers in Bristol.

The mural pays tribute to Kamil Ahmed, a Kurdish asylum seeker who had sought sanctuary in the UK after being persecuted in Iraq and was murdered in Bristol in 2016. Yeo said the new mural is to “build solidarity in his honour”.

The objective of the artwork is to raise awareness about what project organiser Rebecca Yeo describes as the “actively and deliberately disabling” UK asylum system.

As well as a strong political undertone, Yeo, a senior research associate in disability, asylum and migration at Bristol University, said the mural was also about “bringing people together to learn from each other and improve understanding of similarities and differences in our experiences”.

https://twitter.com/disabmurals/status/1467498334378147847

Stretching across the entire wall, the mural’s intricate design is overcast by a rainbow, in which its colour palette gradually changes from technicolour to monochrome, the grey end representing the sometimes harrowing experiences of asylum seekers.

Yeo said, however, that the mural was “not intended to be a mural of despair because the injustices are not inevitable”.

A whole host of ideas, words and drawings were brought together to produce the mural’s design by Andrew Bolton, an artist whose career has involved the creation of murals and mosaics for public spaces informed by his own experience of disability.

Bolton said he was “pleased that we have so many stories embedded in it and that people’s contributions have been genuinely represented”.

The artwork includes a tribute to Kamil Ahmed, who was killed five years ago in Bristol – photo by Betty Woolerton

Stacey Yelland, chief executive of Eastside Community Trust, said the community centre was chosen as the blank canvas for the artwork due to its “long history of forging connections between diverse communities and supporting social action and campaigns for change”.

On the research that led to the project, Yeo explained the intersectionality between disabled people and people with experience of the asylum system.

She said during a speech at the opening: “Many asylum seekers experience severe mental distress, or have other forms of impairments, sometimes caused by the asylum system and sometimes not. This mural brings people together to highlight that the UK asylum system is actively and deliberately disabling.”

The revealing of the mural art comes in the wake of a controversial proposed rule change added to the Nationality and Borders Bill, which was passed by the Commons with a majority of 67 votes this week.

Rachel Bee, co-founder of the Bristol Hospitality Network, described the bill at the event as a theft of “the right to sanctuary enshrined in law after the Second World War for those fleeing persecution”.

Main photo by Betty Woolerton

Read more: Supporting women seeking asylum in Bristol 

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