Exhibition / 7 March — 29 March 2025
Centrala announces their upcoming exhibition ‘Reframing Migration’ by Ieva Baltaduonyte.
Reframing Migration critically examines how lexical choices in four major UK newspapers contribute to the depersonalisation of migrants, often reducing them to faceless statistics or negative stereotypes. Through a combination of photography and text-based analysis, the project aims to humanise and amplify the voices of those often overlooked, reshaping how migration is perceived and visualised in UK media. By juxtaposing migrant portraits with linguistic analysis, the project highlights the disconnect between how migration is framed in the media and how it is experienced by individuals.
Transnational migration is perhaps the most highly contested issue across Europe. For new migrants spatial and temporal displacement is potentially traumatic, resulting in shifting identities where home can no longer be understood as a fixed knowable entity. Ieva is preoccupied with revealing personal and collective narratives where trauma, identity and memory encourage a deeper engagement with cross-cultural dialogue.
By using photography for both personal expression and to foster a critical dialogue with contemporary society, she invites the viewer to participate in societal debates, foregrounding human experiences, and exposing what is otherwise obscured or ignored. Her carefully constructed projects combine politics and aesthetics inviting a dialogical relationship with the viewer.
This exhibition is a part of I-CLAIM project which investigates the living and working conditions of irregularised migrant households in Europe from an intersectional perspective. It aims to reveal the spectrum of irregularity in contemporary Europe and cast light on the everyday experiences of migrants. I-CLAIM develops the concept of ‘irregularity assemblages’ to capture how migrants’ ‘irregular condition’ is produced by the interplay of immigration and asylum laws, policies and practice, wider labour market and welfare regimes, and political, media and public narratives. The irregular condition is shaped by migrants’ social position and positionality as well as by processes that occur at international, European, regional and local levels.
Ieva Baltaduonyte (b.1988 in Kaunas, Lithuania) is a lens based artist and graduate of the Photography BA programme at the Dublin Institute of Technology. Informed by her own personal experience of displacement, her artistic practice engages with topics and issues relating to migratory culture. Central to her work are the psychological consequences of migration, such as displacement trauma, as well as the concepts home, identity and the in-between state. After spending seventeen years living in Dublin, Ireland, Ieva has recently returned to her native Lithuania, where she is currently based.