These photo works came immediately to mind after news yesterday that President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau reached a deal to close a popular but unofficial Canadian border crossing used by 10s of thousands of refugees seeking asylum. (See news item here and here)

Photographer Thomas Kiefer’s decade as a part-time janitor at a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Facility in Arizona led to these heart-wrenching shots. Disturbed by the volume of discarded food, clothing and belongings of migrants and smugglers – some after seizure by immigration and customs, the rest simply left behind – he began cataloging the items in this series of powerful still lifes.

Kiefer says that “for many of those years, I was allowed to collect and take the food transported by migrants, that was discarded during the first stages of processing, to our community food bank, an estimated sixty tons by the person who managed it.”

Kiefer says that “how we treat others is a reflection of who we are. When belts, shoelaces, toothbrushes, socks, shoes, underwear, pants, shirts, jackets, watches, bibles, wallets, coins, cell phones, keys, jewellery, calling-cards, water, food, soap, deodorant, gloves, medicine, birth control pills, blankets and rosaries are considered non-essential personal property and discarded, regardless of the amount and origin, something becomes less than human.”

“These belongings, necessary for hygiene, comfort and survival, were deemed “non-essential” or “potentially lethal.,” Kiefer says. “I ask the viewer to consider these photographs as untold and unknown stories, markers of human journeys cut short.”

See Tom Kiefer’s full series on his website, here.

It’s appropriate that Karine Giboulo’s first European showing is in Germany, ground zero of the international refugee crisis. The Montreal artist has created another of her exquisite miniature worlds to give us passionate social commentary – this time on migration.

Waves, on exhibit through April at Art Mûr Leipzig, is composed of hundreds of polymer clay components formed into miniature three-dimensional works. The pathos of a flight from conflict or persecution is reduced to easily grasped human scenes.

Every human deserves access to peace, prosperity and freedom, notes the text accompanying the Giboulo exhibition. “Should it take small figurines contained within a mock barbed wire encampment, appropriately arranged in a gallery setting . . . to remind us of the fact that our world system has consequence and the toll of this consequence is human suffering?”

It is an important question everywhere, increasingly so in Canada. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel faces backlash for her decision to open the country to refugees and the issue is expected to be central to federal elections there in September.

Giboulo has worked in a variety of media since 2000, but has gained special attention for these dioramas.  Village Démocratie, posted here in 2013, tackled Third World slums. She has also taken on consumerism, (All you can eat, 2008),  street living in India (City of Dreams, 2013) and  residential schools  (Broken Circle, 2015).

Karine Giboulo has exhibited widely in Canada and the U.S. and has works held in the permanent collections of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection ( Kleinburg, Ontario), the Montreal Museum of Fine Art (Québec, Canada) and the 21c Museum’s (Kentucky, USA). She was the 2011 laureate of the prestigious Winifred Shantz national award for ceramic artists.

Karine Giboulo’s website, here.

Represented by Art Mûr, Montreal, here.

This is #7 in the series 150 Artists.