The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN Refugee Agency, is staging a photo exhibit entitled Nowhere People: The World’s Stateless, featuring photographs of Greg Constantine on stateless people in different countries on November 18 to 30 at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Little Theater Lobby Wall.
The exhibit focuses on the plight of stateless people who have been denied the right of citizenship and are refused most social, civil and economic rights. The exhibit intends to give a small voice to people who for generations have had none. It aims to show the human toll the denial of citizenship has claimed on people and ethnic groups that find themselves excluded from society by forces beyond their control. More importantly, it hopes to provide tangible documentation of proof that millions of people hidden and forgotten all over the world actually exist. Statelessness results from conflict, shifting borders or the creation of a new state, but, in most cases, it is rooted in discrimination and intolerance. There are an estimated 12 million stateless people all over the world.
Greg Constantine is an award winning photojournalist from the United States. In 2005, he moved to Asia and began work on his project “Nowhere People”. His work has received a number of awards including from Pictures of the Year International NPPA Best of Photojournalism, the Amnesty International Human Rights Press Awards (Hong Kong), the Society of Publishers in Asia, and the Harry Chapin Media Award for Photojournalism. Constantine was a co-winner of the Osborn Elliot Prize for Journalism in Asia, presented annually by the Asia Society. Work from his project “Nowhere People” has been widely published and has been exhibited in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, Switzerland, Ukraine, Hong Kong and Kenya. He is currently based in in southeast Asia.
The UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is a specialized agency of the UN mandated to lead and coordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. It also seeks to reduce situations of forced displacement and statelessness by encouraging states and other institutions to create conducive to the protection of human rights and the peaceful resolution of disputes.
With the showing of the exhibit in the Philippines, the UNHCR hopes to raise the awareness of the public and relevant stakeholders on statelessness issues that affect the country. The launch of the exhibit at the CCP coincides with the last day of the regional conference on the rights of women and children in relation to statelessness, organized jointly by the ASEAN Inter-governmental Commission on Human Rights and UNHCR being held in Manila.
For more information, please call CCP Visual Arts at Tel. No. 832-1125 local 1504-05.
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