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.

Molly Worthen on the charismatic leaders of America's cosmic drama

The plots and plotters that hold us spellbound

Nick Jones

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

Viewed from behind, Trump raises a fist.

Trump on the stump.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

What happens when Americans lose faith in their religious institutions—and politicians fill the void? In Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Molly Worthen sweeping history helps us understand the forces that create leaders and hold their followers captive.

Everyone feels it. Cultural and political life in America has become unrecognizable and strange. Firebrands and would-be sages have taken the place of reasonable and responsible leaders. Nuanced debates have given way to the smug confidence of yard signs. Worthen asks just how did we get here?

Worthen, a historian argues that we will understand the present moment if we learn the story of charisma in America. From the Puritans and Andrew Jackson to Black nationalists and Donald Trump, the saga of American charisma stars figures who possess a dangerous and alluring power to move crowds. They invite followers into a cosmic drama that fulfils hopes and rectifies grievances—and these charismatic leaders insist that they alone plot the way.

Author and historian Tom Holland loved this book.

“The great story of charisma in American history, from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to MAGA, has never been more thrillingly told, never more learnedly explicated.”

In this extract, entitled Plotlines, Worthen introduces her four categories of charismatic leader: Prophets. Conquerors, Agitators, and Gurus.

Plotlines

Over the past several years, whenever I told friends or family that I was writing a book about charisma, they responded with a reasonable question. Which charismatic figures would I include? They peppered me with suggestions: What about Elvis Presley, or Dolly Parton? Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali? Surely I had to say something about Taylor Swift, right?

None of these fascinating people appears in this book. As you read it, you will probably think of a dozen others whom you wish I had included, and I’m sure you’ll have a point. I have mostly stuck to individuals who worked to build a movement in organized religion or politics, rather than musicians, artists, or athletes. Even within the spheres of religion and politics, I’ve been selective in order to craft a manageable story and bring into focus the patterns and transformations of charismatic leadership over the course of American history.

Sometimes this is an inspiring story, because charismatic leaders often turn up—and people decide to follow—out of a desperate response to alienation and injustice. People in anguish seek a savior. Yet charisma has no fixed moral standing. It can carve a path to freedom or to enslavement; it can lead people to embrace the rule of law or to sneer at it. Charisma causes problems for democracy as well as for authoritarian regimes. Without a sustained analysis of charisma over the long haul of American history since European settlement began, we are doomed to bumble along, blandly observing that ordinary people declare many allegiances that seem to contradict their own material interests and sabotage democracy—but never understanding why.

Over the past four centuries, five types of charismatic leaders have surged to dominance, each offering a variation on the great paradox, a different way for followers to hand over control while feeling liberated. I use these categories both to classify leaders and their movements, and to chart historical change: each type reacts to the type that came before, and responds to the pressures and anxieties of its own era. Like all typologies, this one maps imperfectly onto real people. Almost no one is a “pure” example of these categories, and some leaders are interesting precisely because they react against their age’s dominant type. But these categories have compelled even leaders who defied easy labels—that’s most of them—to respond to the ascendant charismatic style of their age.

The Prophets take us from the end of the Middle Ages into something beginning to resemble our own world. They drew on ancient patterns of contact with the divine to challenge authorities and captivate followers with the terror and ecstasy of God’s presence. They hewed close to tradition, operating in a time when Old World strictures still constrained life in the New World rather tightly. But some used those traditions to undermine reigning institutions, whether by violent rebellion or illicit gatherings—and so provoked a backlash. If the Prophets conceived of freedom in terms of divine salvation, they often harnessed mystical power for this-worldly ends. Usually this meant dismantling any structure that stood in God’s way.

The Prophets were, essentially, destroyers. In their wake they provoked an age of builders.

The Conquerors rose to prominence in the early nineteenth century—an age of mythology, mass media, and frontier enthusiasm in the European American imagination. They swung away from the age of the Prophets, who had so much to say about how powerless humans are.

Some of the Conquerors wielded military power, but all of them pursued what we might call metaphysical conquest. They fought to control spiritual forces. As the predestinarian Puritanism of earlier generations lost its appeal, more people placed an almost fundamentalist faith in the power of free will. It was tempting to think of spiritual forces—perhaps even the Holy Spirit— as a kind of technology, ready for manipulation. The stakes in these campaigns were high at a time when new advances in science impinged on everyday life. Waves of immigration made the country more religiously and ethnically diverse. Americans felt both freer and yet more confined than ever before.

The Agitators gained sway at the turn of the twentieth century, protesting modernity as a raw deal and democracy as tyranny in disguise. The Conquerors had, overall, expanded government authority over Americans’ lives and advanced a golden idea of progress. Now the pendulum swung back toward calls for destruction. The Agitators found a market for attacking the state and denouncing so-called progress as a lie. They defined themselves as outsiders whether they were or not, and discovered that gaining material power does not mean that one must stop telling a story of exile and affliction. This proved to be an important lesson in an age of world war and economic disaster: global crises have a way of transfiguring an outcast dissenter into a credible threat tot he standing order. Meanwhile, Christians grew wilder in their displays of New Testament charisma—because, paradoxically, it was easier to grapple with what Max Weber called the “iron cage” of modernity by embracing ever more outlandish signs of divine power.

The Experts were, on the face of things, the Agitators’ opposite in charismatic style. They were builders. In the wake of World War II, they capitalized on a backlash against the nightmare years of fascist demagogues, embraced the zenith of traditional institutions’ authority across Western culture and politics, and nurtured Americans’ faith in the power of technology and bureaucracy to solve large-scale problems.

They claimed the mantle of reason and procedure and did their best to relegate the political or religious clout of charisma to the distant past or primitive cultures.

But in fact, the three decades after World War II witnessed an explosion of religious revival in America—led by Christians who spoke in tongues, looked for the end times, and claimed to heal through the power of the Spirit. Even in the domain of credentialed and supposedly secular healing, the line between medicine and spirituality grew fuzzier. These years were the Experts’ apogee of cultural prestige, but Americans’ long- standing ambivalence about intellectual elites persisted. The most successful leaders capitalized on those mixed feelings. They nursed the tension between the Cold War celebration of science and freedom and, on the other hand, the lurking sense that technological leaps obscured eternal truths and needed the organizing power of a good story.

By the end of the twentieth century, as Americans lost faith in established media, churches, government, and nearly every other bulwark of modern society, the destructive strain of charismatic leadership re-surfaced in the form of the Gurus: preachers of self-actualization and get-enlightened-quick schemes, promoting God’s new temp job as personal assistant. Old-fashioned Pentecostal revival persisted too, but its leaders struggled to prevent the culture wars from capturing the Holy Spirit.

The Gurus looked, at first glance, like the Prophets and the Agitators. But in the generations since those earlier eras, it had become harder to pay obeisance to tradition—which was just fine, since the erosion of institutions had weakened traditions anyway, and opened a path for Gurus to achieve more influence than their destructive predecessors. Religious and philosophical tradition, in the hands of the Gurus, was no longer a firm guide but a palette for painting illusions of independence. Sometimes they used it to depict a new reality impervious to fact-checkers.

“Guru,” which means “remover of darkness” in Sanskrit, was originally a religious term. But in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the most prominent guru in the country was a businessman named Donald Trump. Trump was not, personally, a paragon of conventional religious devotion. Yet his political career depended on a hunger among his most dedicated supporters that can only be called spiritual. Like so many relationships between charismatic leaders and their followers, it stumped and angered those on the outside. Against the backdrop of the American charismatic tradition, however, his success makes perfect sense.

How, then, did early modern mystics and Puritan heretics who heard the voice of the Holy Spirit give way to devotees at a modern presidential rally, jostling toward the candidate iPhone-first, praying for a selfie? By the early twenty-first century, most religious institutions in the West had declined into husks of their former authority—at least by the usual measures. Today commentators turn more than ever to materialist explanations for political dysfunction, polarization, and the culture’s general crisis of confidence. They cite growing social inequality, impassable disagreements on policy, persistent racism and xenophobia, evil automated forces lurking on the internet. All true—yet all insufficient accounts. If we define the religious impulse as a hunger for transcendent meaning and a reflex to worship, then it is a human instinct only slightly less basic than the need for food and shelter, and Americans are no less religious than they have ever been. They will always find a way to satisfy these desires, even if charisma carries them down strange and costly paths.

Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump, Penguin Random House, 2025.