ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—Chinese artist Ai Weiwei visited Gaza this week as he continues filming a documentary on refugees. “We have to coexist,” Ai said in an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP). “We have to understand and to be inclusive to other people – different types of people – because humanity is the only thing we have.” Ai is a strong advocate for the millions who are forced to flee their homes and seek refuge elsewhere. He has developed several art installations and projects on the subject. The artist has set up a studio on the Greek island of Lesbos, hosting thousands of refugees who arrive on boats from Turkey, and has expressed interest in creating a memorial on the island to honour the thousands who have lost their lives making the dangerous sea crossing. In February he displayed thousands of the lifejackets shed by refugees who survived the journey to Greece on the columns of a Berlin concert hall. Also in February, Ai recreated the image of drowned Alan Kurdi. In January, Ai closed an exhibition of his work in Copenhagen in protest of a decision of the Danish parliament to seize valuables from asylum seekers to offset costs of hosting the refugees. For his documentary, Ai has also visited refugee camps on the Greek-Macedonian border, doing hundreds of interviews. He described the situation of the refugees as difficult and something that needs to be shared. Filming inside Gaza is a vital part of telling the story of refugees and breaking down barriers between people Ai noted, stressing the global nature of the issue. “If we are doing a documentary film, we have to search [for] what happened in this refugee situation in the global sense, and Gaza is a very, very important location we have to film in,” Ai told AFP. “We are living in the 21st century. We have to accept that all humans are equal, he added. “We are not different from each other.” His visit to Gaza has, predictably, generated a lot of interest from both Israelis and Palestinians who are closely following the artist on social media. The dissident artist has courted frequent controversy in his native China. He has been beaten and jailed several times because of his art, which he often uses to express human rights themes. In 2011 he was named Time Magazine’s most persecuted artist. Ai now resides in Germany. Ai’s documentary film is expected to be released next year. There are more than 60 million refugees in the world today, half of them are children. The UN recently released figures that illustrate the disproportionate international assistance given to refugees. Almost 90 percent of all the world’s refugees are hosted in developing countries with just eight countries hosting more than half of all refugees. And just ten countries provide 75 percent of the UN’s budget for refugees. In publishing these figures, the United Nations says, “This is not a crisis of numbers; it is a crisis of solidarity.” “We can afford to help, and we know what we need to do to handle large movements of refugees and migrants,” wrote UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in an opinion piece in The Express Tribune last week. “Yet too often, we let fear and ignorance get in the way. Human needs end up overshadowed, and xenophobia speaks louder than reason.” The Kurdistan Region is hosting more than 2 million refugees and Iraqi Internally Displace People (IDPs). Over the generations, millions of Kurds have had to flee their homes and become refugees. There are now more than 1.5 million Kurds living in Europe and sizable Kurdish populations live in North America.
