Building solidarity amongst Iranian refugees through shared expression.

Summary

Dr. Roghieh Dehghan-Zaklaki's project used creative workshops to help Iranian refugee torture survivors express their trauma, fostering solidarity and connection through art. The resulting exhibition, held during Iranian New Year, validated their experiences and created lasting bonds within the community.

Dr Roghieh Dehghan-Zaklaki is a doctoral researcher with UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture and Society. As well as this she is a practicing GP and was the mastermind behind an impressive public engagement programme in which she entered creative collaboration with her research communities. For this blog, she spoke to Siân Aggett about the process of engagement

Roghieh’s research, supported by the Wellcome Trust, focuses on the mental health and trauma of Iranian refugee torture survivors. Specifically, she is working to understand the moral and ethical aspects of experiences of trauma and how they impact the wellbeing of refugees. To answer this complex question, she has worked across disciplines drawing on sociology, psychology, anthropology and human rights discourse. Her research involved both desk-based study as well as, data collection with torture victim/survivors through interviews and focus groups with healthcare professionals.

Roghieh’s sense of responsibility to these research participants for sharing their difficult and personal stories led her to explore the potential of engagement work. Her hope was to foster social connection, as she observed that many traumatised refugees felt lost and isolated. The stigma of refugee status, combined with the social and political divisions within the Iranian community, was likely to prevent this group from receiving the emotional support they needed. This complex intersection of marginalisation and trauma could potentially intensify their sense of isolation and impact their mental health.

She decided that an arts exhibition could be a way to share something about the collective experience of Iranian refugees in the UK. Roghieh secured dedicated funding from her research funder with which she achieved an impressive amount of work.

Two artists were brought in to lead workshops with groups of participants from the Iranian refugee community living in London and connected to charities working to support this population. Two of the arts workshop groups were mixed-gender and the third included was exclusively for some of the women who preferred to work in a women-only space.

The artists were both from the Middle East, one Iranian and one Franco-Lebanese. This was important for building rapport and trust.

“Both of them were Middle Eastern…I think having someone from the Middle East helped. One was not Iranian, there are nuances in Iran that she wouldn’t know, but she knew enough. She knew a bit of a cultural alphabet”. – Roghieh

Each group attended a couple of three-hour workshops, working on individual artworks as well as collaborative pieces in response to loose thematic prompts. The first workshop was themed The Colours of Migration/Mental Health, where participants had the opportunity to get creative while getting to know one another and sharing their stories. The second workshop focused on creative expressions around Solidarity and Vision . They worked on individual artworks as well as collaborative pieces in response to loose thematic prompts:

“They knew the project was about stigma around mental health and refugee status, and that the aim was to create solidarity…We gave them prompts, like we would just say, use colours of migration”. – Roghieh

The creation of one of the artworks for the exhibition.

Roghieh considered the workshop environment carefully. This meant addressing both the physical space as well as agreeing a social contract for all participants in the space:

“We used spaces at UCL because some of the rooms at UCL are very large, very beautiful… I think the environment was very important. And I played music, Farsi music…We emphasized that we were there to work on art, and we said very clearly, no political discussions and it worked”! – Roghieh

With these in place participants felt free and inspired to create. In one activity participants created trees in clay which an artist brought together as a solidarity forest. This became a central piece in the exhibition. One of the artistic outputs was an animation which was screened in a Bedouin tent something Roghieh realised that attendees loved partly for the sense of intimacy and connection that it created. Participants were also invited to write in their own time on the themes of migration, identity and mental health in notebooks that they were provided with At the exhibition, these words, edited and collaged by another artist, could be heard on interactive telephones read by actors in Farsi and English.

Participants knew that they were working towards an exhibition which gave the project a strong sense of purpose and direction. The exhibition itself was held over 5 days during Iranian New Year, at one of London Southbank’s landmarks, the OXO tower. It was a conscious decision of Roghieh’s to host the exhibition at a special time for Iranian people.

“It [Iranian new year/Norouz] is emotionally and culturally very important to Iranians. And it is in March, at the beginning of spring”. – Roghieh

The show was widely promoted through refugee and mental health charities and attracted over 500 visitors both Iranian and non-Iranian. Participants reported that having their work shown at such a significant time and in such a prominent place worked to validate their experiences in a way they could not have imagined.

“We wanted to be visible. We wanted Iranians from all over the UK to be able to come because some participants were not from London”. – Roghieh

The impact on people visiting was tangible.

“People would come in tears to me [after visiting the exhibition] They were extremely touched, especially by the telephone and by the animation video”. – Roghieh

Whilst the project did not seek to be therapeutic, Roghieh also noted how significant the creative workshops had for participants, enabling a conversation that was otherwise very difficult to have.

“The topic is very heavy. You are talking about torture. You are talking about stigma, lack of solidarity…The creative part of the public engagement gave me the opportunity to approach the topic not in an academic and mechanical way…but to  really work with the community together, be very interactive and less intimidating…” – Roghieh

Roghieh noted that female participants in particular formed new friendships and were keen to continue to meet with one another.

‘They loved it so much that they were asking for more workshops!’ – Roghieh

Looking back on the project Roghieh reflects on how the project has influenced her as a social researcher.

“Public engagement helped me to build trusting relationships in community…It really is very important, especially in traumatized communities.” – Roghieh

She still can’t quite believe how much she learnt on the job (logistics, budgeting, securing exhibition space, etc) and her advice would recommend that others bring in professional support such as a producer/curator, should you hope to do something at a similar scale.

If you are keen to see more of the works, they are being exhibited online:. The solidarity forest was also submitted to UCL research photo coemption in 2024 and received and honourable mention:

All the artworks have also been donated to charities that work with Kurdish and Middle Eastern women as well as Freedom from Torture and the Helen Bamber Foundation that provide legal and psychosocial support to torture survivors.

This blog was written by Siân Aggett.