Refugee Week 2025: Community as a Superpower

Hero image Image by Refugee Week 2025

Open Eye Gallery is proud to support Refugee Week 2025! Theme of this year is Community as a Superpower.

Community is the incredible everyday. Ordinary and extraordinary. Simple acts of shared generosity. Kindness multiplied to become an unstoppable force! Communities can bring people together. Bridging divides and offering support. Spaces of resilience and places for healing. 

This Refugee Week everyone is invited to spend time with friends and build new connections in and beyond our neighbourhoods. 

Two of our current exhibitions highlight the superpower of communities and the creativity of people . 

Communities of Welcome at Kirkby Centre: Since January 2025, artist-in-residence Anoosh Ariamehr has been working weekly with a group of Knowsley residents, including people with refugee status, at Huyton Library. Through weekly workshops, Anoosh has supported the group to develop their skills as photographers and artists via workshops, gallery visits and discussion.

The group – Communities of Welcome – became a space for people from diverse cultural and social backgrounds to celebrate their own differences and commonalities. Over several months, the group have used photography to explore their local area, encourage each other and to highlight their own lived experiences of locality and displacement.

Each person brings their own unique history and experiences to a place. This exhibition tells personal stories of connection, identity and place. When these stories are shared, they help us build stronger, more cohesive communities.

Waiting Rooms at The Heart Of Glass: socially engaged photographer Abdullrhman Hassona and members of Cafe Laziz have collaborated to show the diverse culture of St Helens through portraits of people with different immigration and residence statuses. Each image is an introduction to a resident of St Helens and the stories that make a town feel rich with history and experience. The photographs represent people from 13 countries and feature messages in 8 different languages.

“We can begin the process of making community wherever we are. We can begin by sharing a smile, a warm greeting, a bit of conversation; by doing a kind deed or by acknowledging kindness offered to us.”– bell hooks

Images by Declan Connolly

 

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