Facilitation · gallery@oxo / Wellcome
Iranian Diaspora Unity Exhibition
“Community engagement is not a box to tick on a creative project - it is the thing that determines whether the work is genuine or superficial.”
The challenge
An exhibition that needed expert community guidance to be authentic
‘Iranian diaspora: stories of sanctuary and solidarity’ was an ambitious art project exploring migration, uprooting, displacement and solidarity. Working meaningfully with Iranian diaspora communities - many of whom had experienced trauma, displacement and precarious legal status - required specialist expertise in community engagement, safeguarding and diaspora-sensitive facilitation.
The project needed someone who understood how to approach these communities respectfully, how to design workshops that were safe and productive, and how to ensure findings and stories were disseminated in ways that served participants rather than extracted from them.
What we did
Expert guidance on approach, structure, safeguarding and dissemination
Open Routes Research advised the project team on how to approach and work with the Iranian diaspora throughout the development of the exhibition. This included:
- Advising on the overall approach to community engagement with diaspora communities
- Informing the design and structure of community workshops
- Providing safeguarding guidance appropriate to working with communities that included people with lived experience of displacement and precarious immigration status
- Shaping how findings and community contributions were disseminated
The exhibition ran at gallery@oxo, Oxo Tower Wharf - bringing the stories and perspectives of the Iranian diaspora to a broad London audience.
What changed
A successful exhibition - and the foundation for further research
The project culminated in a public exhibition at one of London’s most visible cultural venues. The community engagement work contributed to an exhibition that genuinely reflected the experiences of Iranian diaspora communities rather than representing them from the outside.
The work also provided the groundwork for a PhD Wellcome Trust fellowship - demonstrating the research value of community-engaged creative projects when approached with rigour.