Our Sanctuary

Home is not a place, home is a sound, a feeling, a person, a sanctuary where a community belongs. Inspired by this year’s theme for refugee week, Our Home, and Johnny Pitts’ Home is not a place, this exhibition explores what home means to the migrant community in Portsmouth.

Using poetry, soundscapes and virtual reality this exhibition immerses audiences into an Augmented Reality experience to raise awareness on migration, exile and dislocation. Co-facilitated by artists Michelle Ezeuko and Lara Kobeissi, participants were invited to engage with sculpture and new technologies as conduits to offer asylum seekers moments of joy, laughter, respite and playfulness through conversations about football or music.

The reality is that the search for home doesn’t always result in art, laughter and football. For some it ends in detention and even worse death. In 2024, 880 people died trying to cross the mediterranean sea as there are still no safe routes for asylum seekers trying to get to Europe. Since 2020, this number has risen to 9,893. To give light to this reality, the exhibition also features stories from ‘Detained Voices’ a platform sharing the stories of people in immigration detention.

There are plans to reopen the Haslar immigration detention centre in Gosport. In a climate of increasingly anti-immigration hostility, the threat of deportation to Rwanda still looms over the heads of vulnerable sanctuary seekers who have been detained indefinitely. The UK is the only country in Europe to still practise detention with no time limit. Despite this reality we are committed to telling a different story in Portsmouth.

This exhibition reflects our continued partnership with Portsmouth City of Sanctuary, which we have been supporting since they first established over 5 years ago. Having recently been honoured with the award ‘Gallery of Sanctuary’, the show offers our ongoing commitment to platform spaces of sanctuary in our programme.

About the Artists

Lara Habib Kobeissi is an XR artist based in the UK whose practice draws on creative communal exchange, multi-sensory performance and game mechanics to investigate methodologies of care and connection. She has participated in creating a number of engaging experiences including ‘StoryTrails’, ‘There Exists’ and her project ‘Nazar’.

Michelle Ezeuko is an artist, facilitator and activist whose practice explores our world through the lens of movement and migration with the aim of using art as a healing mechanism. Departing from their own lived experience, Michelle explores the intersections of race and class through hope and radical imagination as a means to visualise a better world. Their work and art invites people to come together and unlearn the borders and binaries that systematically divide and influence us.

About Portsmouth City of Sanctuary

Portsmouth City of Sanctuary (PCoS) is an award-winning grass-roots humanitarian organisation helping local asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in Portsmouth, Gosport and the surrounding areas.