The Asylum Archive: An Archive of Asylum and Direct Provision in Ireland

Asylum Archive is to collaborate with asylum seekers, activists, artists, academics, and immigration lawyers, amongst others, with a view to creating an interactive documentary cross-platform online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory.  

Asylum Archive is not a singular art project that stands outside of society engaging in internal conversation; it is rather a multidisciplinary platform open for dialogue and discussion inclusive to individuals who have experienced a sense of sociological/geographical ‘displacement’, memory loss, social trauma and violence. It is an act of solidarity to bring a different perspective on the life of people who came to Ireland to seek protection.  

Asylum Archive is a political platform and an artefact of Direct Provision as the continuation of the history of Carceral Institutions in Ireland, bearing in mind that we have very little visual information about previous incarcerations of the poor, the marginalised and the undesired in institutions including Magdalene Laundries, Borstals, Mother and Baby Homes, Industrial Schools, psychiatric hospitals, etc.  

About the speaker 

Vukašin Nedeljković is an artist, activist and independent scholar. They have been working on multidisciplinary project Asylum Archive since 2007. In 2017 they were awarded Arts and Activism bursary from Arts Council/Create and published Asylum Archive publication. In 2021 Asylum Archive was featured in The Narrow Gate of the Here - and - Now: Queer Embodiment exhibition to mark 30 years of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. 

In 2021 Disavowing Asylum: Documenting Ireland’s Asylum Industrial Complex book by Ronit Lentin and Nedeljković was published by Rowman and Littlefield. 

Organised by the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies