November 2019 concludes the end of an extensive four months in which Dr Joyce Jiang, Tassia Kobylinska and twelve migrant domestic workers from The Voice of Domestic Workers in London produced a participatory arts project.
This exhibition features a conglomeration of artworks, video installation, photography and documents composed by migrant domestic workers.
This is as part of a participatory arts workshop series initiated by the campaign group The Voice of Domestic Workers. The exhibition exploits the injustice of the 2012 change to Visa renewal by displaying identity documents from domestic workers provided by employers. The video installation vocalises the migrants with their painful experiences, injecting the gallery with the brutal reality of working behind closed doors and being subject to racial, physical and emotional abuse. It brings the domestic abuse out of doors into the public sphere through the blatant exposition the exhibition entails - giving the silenced workers a voice through cooperative expression.
Accompanied by Rioja and Prosecco, guests enjoyed a talk from Dr Joyce Jiang explaining how the exhibition came together and the challenges that are derivative of working with marginalised workers. Dr Joyce Jiang’s foundation in Human Resources equipped the quests with the knowledge to access the exhibition from new angles of enslavement and worker’s rights.
The emphasis of the talk was on Dr Joyce Jiang’s study in migrant workers working in private households. It enlightened the guests that 69% of the migrants that she has worked with didn’t have individual living space; positioning them in a vulnerable liminality in which they are dependent on the conditions of their employer, often treated as a slave. This treatment of being a ‘slave’ is represented in the uniform the domestic workers were unnecessarily made to wear. Some of these uniforms were displayed as part of the exhibition - demonstrating the ridicule associated with it as it separates the servants from the masters in a domestic household.
Dr Joyce Jiang also spoke about how domestic workers can challenge the notion of motherhood. Most employers can keep their workers away from their home country for around five years at a time, restricting the relationship they have with their children since they only see them at intermittent intervals. My Home Is Not My Home exhibits this through the cards parents receive from their children at home; involving the third party observer in the strained emotional relationship suppressed to pen and paper. It is also common for the employer to take away documents and passports in case the worker attempts an escape - leaving them undocumented, which raises issues around identity.
My Home Is Not My Home is a poignant exhibition, raising awareness through participatory expression of the hidden racism that employers hide and suppress. Its exposition will continue to have an effect on the academic and cultural life of the University of York.
Written by Emily Quli
Photos by Aiste Jonynaite