What does it take to survive?
Well, according to all traditional wisdom, the answer is just three things: food, water, and the all-important – and too often difficult to sustain – shelter.
As war, climate disaster, rampant overpopulation, and economic collapse all continue to spread across the globe, massive populations are experiencing displacement and migration, more often than not forced to settle for the barest of shelters in crowded encampments or flimsy pop-up government facilities.
These makeshift cities might be established as temporary measures and intended as short-term solutions, but often become long-term, indefinite homes for the displaced peoples funneled into them, creating dense, precarious communities filled with fear, uncertainty, and struggle, but also life.
It’s that color, sound, and vibrancy of these refugee cities – and their contrast against the stark harshness in which they’ve clung to life – that’s reflected in SHELTER, a new multimedia exhibit on display at Oklahoma Contemporary now through January 6th, 2025.
Hidden life
Told through a collection of miniature, painted ceramic dioramas representing different kinds of refugee communities around the world, the story of SHELTER is far from a simple, detached visual.
Built and embedded into the minimalist ceramic scenes are hidden speakers bursting with sounds and voices, and most creatively, tiny concealed projectors adding human figures, in all their color, energy, and movement inside the tents and bombed-out buildings.
It was this element of showcasing the sounds and energies of life inside of these bleak locations that SHELTER’s artist/creator Lisa Karrer said was the project’s true goal.
“It’s important to be kind of confronted in that way with the sounds and visuals of life inside of these communities,” Karrer told Free Press. “It’s an invitation to see something very private, to have access to people’s worlds in that way.”
The videos inside each of the representative “stations” depict dancing, learning, family, and the simplicities of life, all alongside the continuous, sometimes overlapping audio of various people telling their own stories of migration and flight. Languages blend together and bleed into city noises and singing.
Station to station
Each station represents a different type of displaced community, from the beige walls and crumbling, destroyed buildings of Gaza and Syria to the drab UN tent cities found just outside the borders of so many nations, waiting – maybe forever – to be processed and allowed in.
One station presents a barren desert landscape adorned with impossibly thin, white shelters like you might see from migrant groups attempting to cross Northern Africa.
Another shows a railroad track crowded on either side by multicolored pup tents of all shapes and sizes. It could be a scene from Eastern Europe, or could just as easily be right outside any of OKC’s public shelters.
Each station even has its own subtle lighting, simulating a soft European evening or a harsh, dangerous midday African sun.
To stand at a distance between stations, to try to take it all in at once and see the bigger, global picture, is to be overwhelmed in a cacophonous overlapping of voices and noises, each fighting for dominance in your head.
At a distance, it’s mostly impossible to see the hidden, projected scenes of life and humanity.
But the closer you move toward any station, the more that the noise washes away, leaving only the voices and human stories of the community in which you’re standing. You can hear the people discussing their real experiences and their real lives, and you can peek into the tents and structures to see movement and light and people that you could never see while keeping your distance.
“It’s somebody’s world that you’re looking into,” said Karrer. “It shouldn’t be comfortable for us.”
Each station comes equipped with a QR code that visitors can scan to hear the audios, read the texts, and see the video elements more comfortably if they wish, which is helpful for anyone wanting to dig deeper into these very real stories.
Local stories
When Karrer brought SHELTER to Oklahoma from its previous home in Buffalo, New York, she took time to meet and interview a number of Oklahomans about their own stories of displacement or refugee experiences.
“In Oklahoma, you’ll hear the voices of locally displaced people,” she said. “We have a few Indigenous people who participated, and even a fellow who grew up in the foster care system, who had a really tough time with drugs, which is a different kind of displacement of its own. He said we could use everything he told us. He just really wants people to know.”
That narrator, Oklahoman Trace Chapline, is included among the huge local cast of other narrators and video figures, featuring local names from across the city and even from Contemporary’s own staff, each telling or recreating scenes from their own lives or their family’s histories.
“I want people to be able to have this very intimate experience with the stations and the stories being heard and shown there,” Karrer said.
She knows that the real depth of SHELTER is how these miniature ceramic depictions of communities all over the world can help to frame and better understand the displaced peoples in our own environments..
In Oklahoma, that means confronting our difficult histories of displacement, from Indigenous removals to natural disasters to even the resemblance of the bombed-out urban landscape at one station to our memories of the 1995 Bombing.
“When I bring this to another city later, maybe things will change slightly again,” Karrer said. “I want to have the conversation geared towards the city itself, and every city has its own profile and history of how displaced people exist there.”
SHELTER from artist Lisa Karrer is on display at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center now through January 6th, 2025.
For more information, visit oklahomacontemporary.org.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.