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Human Rights Today at West End Arts Library
12 - 24 January
Human Rights Today
The Human Rights Exhibition at the West End Arts Library is a multi-layered project developed by We Restart – Art Centre of Sanctuary to reflect on the meaning, fragility, and urgency of human rights today. The exhibition brings together different artistic languages and perspectives, creating a shared space where personal stories, cultural heritage, and contemporary concerns intersect. Through photography, calligraphy, and visual artworks, the exhibition invites visitors to slow down, reflect, and recognise human rights not as abstract principles, but as lived realities.
Part one of the exhibition presents a photographic project by Fuad Al Gaadi, documenting childhood in Yemen as a space where innocence and responsibility coexist under extreme conditions. Through collective and individual portraits, the images show children fetching water, caring for siblings, herding animals, and inventing play from scarcity. Smiles become acts of resistance, while silent faces carry exhaustion and maturity far beyond their years. Rather than portraying children as passive victims, the photographs highlight dignity, resilience, and quiet strength, reminding viewers that childhood is a universal right too often interrupted.
Fuad Al Gaadi and the children of Yemen
Part two features a calligraphy project by Sareh Moradi, an Iranian artist whose work bridges Persian literary heritage and contemporary human rights themes. Using Persian calligraphy and mandala-inspired compositions, Sareh visually interprets verses by poets such as Hafez, Rumi, Forough Farrokhzad, Sheikh Bahā’ī, and Ferdowsi. Each work reflects core human rights including life and freedom, love and family, peace, freedom of expression, freedom of belief, and justice. The flowing scripts and precise structures invite contemplation, offering calligraphy as a meditative and quietly powerful affirmation of dignity, inner freedom, and shared humanity.
Left: "Freedom" by Sareh Moradi
Part three brings together works by students from the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome alongside Italian artist Maupal, who collaborated with the students, creating a collective and intergenerational response to human rights issues. Using mixed media, photography, drawing, and printmaking, the students explore themes such as displacement, war, exploitation, inequality, childhood vulnerability, refuge, and hope. Their works move between fragility and resistance, addressing global injustices through personal and symbolic visual languages. Together, these pieces create a polyphonic narrative shaped by diverse cultural backgrounds, using art as a tool to question injustice, foster empathy, and imagine more just and humane futures (Above: "You would not" by Costanza Cuocci. Below: "Diritto" (Right) by Maupal).
You Would Not by Costanza Cuocci
We Restart – Art Centre of Sanctuary has been working on the Human Rights Exhibition since 2024. The project includes the first edition of the Human Rights Festival, launched in June at the O2 Centre in Camden during Refugee Week, alongside two further Refugee Week events in Brent and in Rome, Italy, as part of the first ever edition of Refugee Week Italy, which We Restart contributed to shaping. The very first Human Rights Exhibition was held at the Brent Museum in Willesden Green, North West London. The project also includes a digital exhibition featuring artworks from all over the world, created by professional artists as well as students, children from refugee camps and orphanages, asylum seekers, refugees, and displaced people. The aim is to continue developing this project as a platform for human rights advocacy, particularly in the present moment, when these fundamental rights are increasingly challenged and must never be taken for granted.
Left: "Diritto" (Right) by Maupal