Review

Art

Climate

Culture

Migration

27 December 2023

9 min read

Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration

Personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations. Jonathan Evens reviews Shezad Dawood’s multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A bronze sculpture of a small boat and sea monster tossed in the waves.

Where do we go now?, Shezad Dawood.

Photo: Finnbarr Webster.

Artistic banners are hung high above the nave of a cathedral between pillars and arches.

Labanoff Cycle banners hang in Salisbury Cathedral.

Labanoff Cycle banners depict found objects from the sea bed.

a dark stone modern carved stone font reflects the banners and roof of a cathedral.

Salisbury Cathedral's font reflects the Labanoff Cycle banners.

The obverse of the Where do we go now? sculpture.

Hung in the central aisle of Salisbury Cathedral and reflected in the still water of William Pye’s cruciform font are a series of textile paintings by Shezad Dawood depicting objects recovered from the seabed of the Mediterranean.

Led by Professor Cristina Cattaneo, a team of forensic anthropologists from the Laboratory of Anthropological Forensics (LABANOF at the University of Milan go out with UN rescue teams when ships have sunk or capsized on the journey to Lampedusa and recover the objects and artifacts (as well as human remains). They do so, to create an archive whereby relatives can track missing family members. Unlike wars and natural disasters, there is no established protocol to deal with immigration deaths but, by its interventions, LABANOF is helping to potentially bring a protocol into being.

As seen at Salisbury, Dawood’s Labanof Cycle ranges from a pinch of earth wrapped in a twist of cling film to a passport and a faded photograph. Each of these textile paintings document a life and a journey in tribute both to lives lost and those that were saved.

Dawood became aware of the work of LABANOF through an article in the New York Times and reached out to them while preparing for an exhibition to coincide with the 57th Venice Biennale. As a result, he met with Cattaneo in Milan and she generously gave access to the archive. Dawood recalls:

“It was a shock to actually be confronted with those objects and be in the room with them. I really wrestled with whether it was appropriate to make work in response to those materials. One of the things that decided it for me, when I went away and sat with it, those objects made all of those lives so apparent to me and that was the shock. It transformed refugees and migrants from a statistical basis to something very human. The fact that I was crying looking at the material was what was important in bringing the humanity back to our fellow humans. There’s something very sad, and almost industrial, about viewing our fellows through the prism of statistics and othering them or demonising them as somehow threatening.”

Kenneth Padley, Canon Treasurer and Chair of the Cathedral’s Arts Advisory makes connections between these works and the themes and stories of Advent and Christmas, saying:

“This exhibition is a timely reminder, amid the anticipation and excitement of Advent and Christmas, that Jesus and his family were refugees and were being persecuted.” In these seasons, we recall the vulnerability of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, forced by political order to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem and then by fear of King Herod from Bethlehem to Egypt."

“None of us straightforwardly belong anywhere, however long our forebears have sojourned there, and none of us abide long on this earth”.

Sam Wells

Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, has noted that we are all “strangers and pilgrims on earth”, and that “God is the one who comes to us like one unknown” being “in the world, but the world received him not”. He suggests that it is by the way we receive this challenge, that “the Christian community demonstrates who we realise we are and who we believe God is”.

More than this, he argues that the Bible itself is founded on six journeys, all of which have a bearing on themes of migration: “Jacob and his entourage migrate to Egypt in the midst of famine. This is an economic migration, but really it’s a journey of survival. Moses and the children of Israel migrate from Egypt to the Promised Land. They leave as refugees to flee slavery. They take 40 years to reach their destination, and, when they get there, they face a very hostile environment indeed. Judah loses a battle and is displaced 500 miles to Babylon. There, as Daniel shows, exiles play a vibrant role in public life, and bring unique qualities, represented by the ability to interpret dreams. Jesus travels from Galilee to Jerusalem. He’s living during the occupation by an invading power, Rome. Finally, Paul migrates from Jerusalem to Rome. He’s searching for legal protection in an empire where citizenship transcends geography.”

His conclusion is that “most of what we’d today call migration is in the Bible, and it’s through migration, not in spite of it, that revelation occurs”. As a result, we don’t get Judaism or Christianity without migration. He adds that “the greatest migration of all is of Christ from heaven to earth and back” and the statement that “Here we have no abiding city” “is an announcement that we should consider our whole lives as a season of migration, because we are transiting through earth to find our true home elsewhere”. As a result, “None of us straightforwardly belong anywhere, however long our forebears have sojourned there, and none of us abide long on this earth”.

The exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral is a small part of a large body of work begun when Dawood was working on two separate projects; one which involved research about democracy, the other about the oceans. The title of the exhibition refers to Leviathan, a 1651 text by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes which takes the sea monster described in the Book of Job as a metaphor for the state.

“What’s been quite shocking has been that things people told me we might witness in 10-15 years, I’ve seen happen in five”.

Dawood’s Where do we go now? is a polychromatic painted sculpture, depicting sailors in a small boat encountering a whale, that is inspired by engravings and illustrations from Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, a 1704 pamphlet on the nature of legitimate government that was written in response to Hobbes. The whale represents the State, which threatens to destroy the vessel, prompting the sailors to throw a barrel (or ‘tub’) representing their labour (or ‘capital’) overboard to distract it. With figures representing refugees and a UN rescue worker in Dawood’s sculpture being placed within the Cathedral’s 1215 Magna Carta exhibition space, this work prompts visitors to consider the legacy of Magna Carta and the rights and freedoms of refugees.

Dawood has said that the exhibition is “an exciting opportunity to bring some of the key questions I’ve been asking of climate, migration and our shared humanity … at a time when a renewed sense of sharing and purpose is urgently needed.” In the light of such thinking, Beth Hughes, Salisbury Cathedral’s Visual Arts Curator, suggests that,

“Shezad’s exhibition is a powerful reminder of how we are all connected to each other, and to the natural world … [focusing] the mind to help us think about how we might be part of the solution, to make a better world for ourselves, our loved ones and all of humanity.”

Much of Dawood’s work is concerned with “world-building” and “imagineering”, something that developed from a “youthful love of science fiction, speculative fiction” which he found to be “a really useful space for philosophical dialogue and imagination”. Then, as “confidence and practice grew, I found through conversations with other artists, writers, academics, that we could have these conversations and start to imagine possible or plausible futures as a way to reflect on some of the issues of our time”.

One result has been the Leviathan Cycle, a ten-part film series exploring unexpected narratives that connect the most urgent issues of our times: climate change, migration, and mental health. When he began, he experienced surprise or disbelief at what he was trying to do “which was to imagine the world in 20-50 years’ time” in order to highlight the urgency, “because it felt like we didn’t have much time in which to change course”. He was primarily “thinking about what the immediate fault lines were and how they could deepen and darken in our lifetimes or just beyond”. As he started going out talking to scientists, particularly those working around climate, “there was something quite interesting about this 20-50 year’ timeframe, because their predictions were in that range”. However, “what’s been quite shocking has been that things people told me we might witness in 10-15 years, I’ve seen happen in five”.

How can we find new reserves of empathy and understanding for the difficult circumstances we are going through in our world?”

The Cycle follows the journeys of a cast of characters who are the survivors of a cataclysmic solar event in order to reflect on the systemic crises within our biosphere and imagine where we might end up if we fail to gain a deeper understanding of the intersections between fields of knowledge and ways of living, across and between human and more-than-human ecologies. The first five films imagine a dystopian future while the latter five - of which the latest, Seven and Eight, are on show here – explore “ways to navigate and negotiate this future with each other, with our government; ideally, a new social compact that’s not just human but extends beyond the human”.

Episode 7: Africana, Ken Bugul & Nemo, in the North Transept, takes the viewer on a journey through the Mangroves of Senegal which speaks of our interconnectedness where both science and the imaginary dovetail into a possible, collective future. Episode 8: Cris, Sandra, Papa & Yasmine, in Trinity Chapel, charts an embodied, spiritual, and ecological journey along an age-old Guarani path linking the Brazilian Atlantic Forest to the sea.

The wider Leviathan project from which the work on show in the Cathedral is taken, is the culmination of conversations Dawood has had with a wide range of marine biologists, oceanographers, political scientists, neurologists, and trauma specialists. This approach is typical of his practice, which often involves collaborations with groups and individuals from different disciplines that are transformed into expressive artworks.

The Leviathan Cycle itself has become a large community of scientists and collaborators around the world. The collaborative experience has broadened Dawood’s horizons in terms of how he thinks of the subjects of his work: “It’s not just a protagonist in a film or an artefact, it’s each of these scientists’ individual area of study that they’ve devoted a huge part of life and time to, and so it creates this huge web of obligation. It’s part of empathy and reciprocity, it’s how we work with others and try to do our best.”

As a result, he says: “There’s a debt to generations beyond us. They only stretch us just a little but we become better human beings by doing so. I think it’s also important to go beyond the human as well and stretch our empathy to include the non-human – animals, plants, algae – they’re all systems of which we are part and which we interconnect with in surprising ways. It’s something that I’ve become more actively aware of through this body of work. It just feels pivotal.”

His hope “is that the exhibition encourages visitors to think about ourselves as one humanity”: “My engagement with the topics of climate change and migration are driven by wanting to see a new set of ethical standards established for the world. How can we find new reserves of empathy and understanding for the difficult circumstances we are going through in our world?”

As we come to the end of 2023 and think about the coming new year and further into the future, the beauty of this exhibition and of Dawood’s work is that, as Beth Hughes notes, it “draws you in to explore some of the big questions facing humanity today”. World events in 2023 “have shown us how important it is to care for displaced people and the importance of looking after our natural world”. Kenneth Padley says, “The overriding message is a call to action before it is too late”, which is why the exhibition is prefaced with a verse from St Paul’s letter to the Romans that simply states, “Live in harmony with one another”.

Leviathan, An exhibition by Shezad Dawood at Salisbury Cathedral, 28 November 2023 – 3 February 2024.

Interview

Culture

Education

Justice

S&U interviews

17 February 2025

8 min read

How justice shaped a world of rights

Historian John Coffey talks about his contribution to a new book: Justice & Rights.

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

A statue of a woman holding a spear in one hand a lightening bolt in the others that reads: 'Droits de l'homme'.

A French statute celebrating Human Rights.

DDP on Unsplash.

In our networked world old problems, and new ideas to solve them, flash across our minds and screens. It can be a hectic and dis-orientating feeling that occurs when we try to make sense of it all. Whether it's the global order changing or yet another injustice occurring.

Seeking insights on all this means crossing boundaries, and that’s what over 160 scholars do by sharing with each other. The members of the Global Faculty Initiative (GFI), drawn from all faculties usual in great universities, integrate faith and scholarship through dialogues. They examine the themes of justice, order, flourishing and beauty - mixing subject matter expertise in everything from physics to public policy.

The GFI has just published the results of one such dialogue in a book Justice and Rights. Among the contributors is Professor John Coffey. His work explores the history of religion and the big ideas like justice and rights. Recently he talked with GFI coordinator Bethan Willis, on its Justice podcast series. Here’s an extract of the discussion that looks at the ‘genealogy of rights.’

Bethan Willis So, shifting focus now to the question of rights, particularly. So, you talk in your Brief about the genealogy of rights, and in his Theology Brief, Nicholas Wolterstorff makes a case for placing rights at the centre of our understanding of justice, but that's obviously not an uncontested move. And some people would see a focus on rights as problematic, and part of the debate about the legitimacy or the value of rights can sometimes centre around the question of where rights actually come from. So which period in history, which philosophy and vision of human life and justice gives rise to this language. So can you tell us a little bit about that kind of trajectory that you've set out in your Brief , the different points at which people might identify rights as coming to the fore and why that happens and the various interests at play in these discussions of where rights come from?

John Coffey So it can be very confusing if you read the scholarship on this subject because if you listen to someone like Samuel Moyne, he will argue that the human rights revolution of the 1970s really invents human rights or maybe grudgingly the 1940s and the conservative statesmen who created the UN declaration of human rights in that period. Others, of course, would root it in the enlightenment. And I guess this is a classic answer. It's the enlightenment and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which is really at the heart of the story of rights. But then early modernists and medievalists pushback, they see natural rights language, the idea of individual subjective rights that one has simply on the basis of one's humanity. These are distinct from legal rights, but they're individual natural rights that they would see this concept emerging in the Middle Ages with canon lawyers and Juris and so on, and then being embraced by various 17th, 16th, 17th century groups up to Locke.

And I think there are different things going on here. One, of course, is that there are turf wars between historians in different periods who want to draw attention to their period as being really seminal in various ways. People have talked about the revenge of the medievalists, the early modernists and the Renaissance specialists who made so much emphasis on this being a radical break from the dark mediaeval past that mediaevalists have always been keen to push back against that and to point to the mediaeval roots of a lot of modern concepts. But I think there's also more going on here. I think in some ways it's part of a bigger argument about political and to some extent economic liberalism as well, because rights language has been so important for liberals, whether they're talking about politics or talking about economics. So, you have an example of rival genealogies being used for political purposes, if you like, to both problematize and legitimize, right?

BW Your work is focused on the contributions that religious groups have made to politics and ideas. And you particularly reference the Levellers in the 17th century and the abolitionists at the turn of the 18th, 19th century. Can you tell us a bit about the contribution that Christians may have made to the development of rights and particularly to the rights of freedom of conscious thought and belief in particular?

JC Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to emphasize this because there's also been a long tradition of suspicion of rights language among Christians, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I mean, this has obviously been true in the Catholic church in the 19th century where there was deep suspicion of liberalism and the individualism associated with it and rights language was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by many traditionalist Catholics. But it's also true in Protestant circles as well, among some high Anglicans. But you could see it in the Dutch Calvinist tradition, they founded an anti-revolutionary party after the French Revolution, which is very critical of the political language which emerges from that event. So, it's interesting to see how historians and intellectual historians in recent decades have recovered what you might call the theological origins of rights talk. And that's true of people like Brian Tierney writing about the mediaeval era and showing the kind of seminal influence of various mediaeval theorists of natural law, but also natural rights.

And certainly, when you get to the period I'm most familiar with from the 17th century onwards, groups like the Levellers are not just talking about native rights or legal rights that they have as Freeborn Englishmen. They're also talking about universal natural human rights that individuals have on the basis of their humanity. And it's in that period in the 17th century that people begin really for the first time to talk about freedom of religion as a natural right. I mean, you don't see that in the Middle Ages. It's a development that emerges within particularly radical Protestantism in the 17th century. Though interestingly, it's also tied to the idea of duties. So because we have a duty to worship God according to our conscience, consciences must be left free and the individual must have a natural right to worship God according to their conscience, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to please God if they just follow the dictates of the state or the state church that they wouldn't be able to worship in a way that's pleasing to God. So, it is interesting the way the argument works. It's theistic grounded in a sense, but it applies not just to Christians, it applies to other kinds of religious worship, to Jews, to Muslims, to heathens and so on.

And you can see more widely a theological grounding for rights in figures like Locke. And that's encapsulated, obviously famously in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drafted in 1776, that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’. So, this idea that we have certain rights that we cannot transfer over to the state, that we can alienate them over to the state, they're inalienable, and we have a solemn responsibility before God to protect them. So yeah, I mean, it's certainly by the 18th century, this rights language is absolutely flourishing within Protestant circles, and you can see it being taken up quite significantly in the abolitionist movement in the 1780s, though people are also shying away from it in the 1790s because of the French Revolution and Tom Payne's rights of man and so on. But if you read 19th century American religious abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglas or William Lloyd Garrison or others, they're using the language of natural rights, pretty insistently.

BC And it's often to articulate the kind of victim's perspective, isn't it, to defend the weak against the mighty and to say there's a bigger kind of justice that is beyond the state or the law. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit about how that works?

JC Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right, and it's one reason why we should be wary about just tossing, tossing rights language out as some kind of secular poisoning of the, well, a, it does have some deep roots in Christian thought, but it also, rights language is also designed as one of the weapons of the weak, if you like. It's a way to defend those whose claims are often ignored and to assert their human dignity. So, it's why it gets taken up so much by religious minorities, by those who are pushing for widening the vote and suffrage maybe to all men, maybe eventually to women. The anti-slavery movement is using it, and of course, by the 20th century, the Civil Rights movement.

BC But as you said, Wilberforce himself doesn't really use this language much, partly because the arenas he's speaking in and partly because of these associations with the French Revolution. Is that right?

JC Yeah, and if you look in the 1790s, it's interesting because it's from that period really the language of left and right starts to emerge, and those on the right are very much concerned about law and order. They look across at France and they see disorder and the guillotine and regicide and Civil War and the exile of Catholic priests and so on, and it's extremely alarming for them. So, the emphasis very much shown law and order, and they become extremely alarmed by the way that rights language has been used to undermine order. So, it's classically articulated at that divide between Edmund Burke on the one side and Tom Payne on the other. What's interesting in the British context, is you'll find sort of devout Protestant Christians on both sides of that. So, Wilberforce would be very much on Burke's side in this argument, but the founder of the London corresponding society in the 1790s, a man called Thomas Hardy, he's actually a devout Scottish Calvinist, and he's absolutely on board with this rights language. And so different religious groups will be divided over this.

Follow the rest of John and Bethan's conversation on the GFI podcast.

John Coffey on Justice.