Border Country

Melanie Friend
Exhibition & book launch event: Thursday 15 November, 7 – 9pm
15 November to 11 January

Border Country by Melanie Friend is an exhibition of medium-format photographs, with a sound installation of voiced testimonies of asylum seekers and migrants in detention in the UK. A publication of the work, with essays by Mark Durden, Alex Hall and Melanie Friend will also be launched at the opening event.

Melanie Friend began work on Border Country in 2003. Since then, more than 25,000 individuals per year have been held for some period in immigration detention in the UK. Immigration detainees in Northern Ireland had, until last year been held in Maghaberry and Hydebank Wood prisons. They are now automatically transferred to detention centres in Scotland and England.

Melanie Friend has photographed the visits rooms in eight Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs): Dover, Colnbrook and Harmondsworth (near Heathrow), Lindholme (near Doncaster), Tinsley House (near Gatwick), Campsfield House (near Oxford), Yarl’s Wood (near Bedford) and Haslar (near Portsmouth). She also obtained permission to photograph some landscapes. As a visitor she met asylum seekers and migrants in several IRCs, and was given special access to record interviews with male detainees in Dover, and female detainees in Yarl’s Wood. The exhibition and publication include voice recordings that evoke complex identities and the physical and psychological experience of life in detention.

Belfast Exposed Gallery, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast BT1 2FF