Dudley College students exhibition on refugees is now on display at The Archives building, Dudley.

Transcript

00:00 So we've got Phil and Chris and we're here looking at the Dudley Refugee Project exhibition

00:05 at Dudley Archives building. Just tell me guys, just kind of roughly what it's about,

00:11 what people expect to see when they come? So yeah, so it's an exhibition of our level

00:16 three photography students celebrating community and resilience of local refugees from all around

00:24 the world who've made Dudley their home. We've worked with ESOL students, we've worked with many

00:28 Ukrainians and it's been an honour to help them share their story and to celebrate a sense of

00:36 togetherness and inclusion and kindness in the community and Chris has made some wonderful

00:43 paintings as well for us. Yeah so Chris you've contributed to this as well. I have indeed, yeah.

00:47 Just tell me about your contribution. Sure, so I've been producing portraits of the refugees

00:55 who we photographed in watercolour to exhibits alongside the photographs because you know the

01:03 whole exhibition is about sort of welcoming these people into our community and I think the

01:09 photographs together with the paintings as well which are part of a wider series of

01:13 portraits I'm doing in general to highlight sort of you know refugees

01:22 across the UK. Form a part of that you know so and it's been great to see how well received all of

01:29 the work has been. It was an incredible opening night last night with more than a hundred people

01:34 here I would say all watching the film that our media students had made and watching all the

01:40 beautiful work by our photography students and meeting a lot of the refugees themselves who

01:44 were here last night. So it's been a hugely successful project. So the exhibition is here

01:50 at the Dudley Archives for between one and two months and it all started when Lord Ian Austin

01:56 commissioned us and it's grown into our biggest and most important project to date. We've looked

02:02 at historical refugees who made Dudley their home in the past, famous mathematicians and hairdressers

02:08 and so we've looked historically and contemporary and it's been

02:13 just a wonderful experience and we've learned so much. Thank you.