This is an Art Fund initiative for the British Museum and V&A to acquire a collection of 20th century and contemporary photography and digital images by artists from the Middle East (whether living in their countries of origin or outside). The Art Fund has given the two museums grants over £150,000 for the collection and additional support for the tour of the collection. Moral explained this piece as follow, 'Immigration is one of the significant problems of our century. They are the new slaves of today. We usually watch them on the media as frustrating groups of people, without identities, stuck in a boat. They are the contemporary marginals. In my work I tried to give them an identity, an expression and finally a soul. In an unsafe boat in the ocean, knowing that at any moment they could go to the bottom we can see their courage by looking in their eyes. If the boat sinks, digital nightingales can fly away but they do not have wings. The nightingale represents love, hope, separation in Turkish literature. I wanted to give wings as a gift to the hopeless ones.'

Provenance

1) Al-Riwaq Gallery, Bahrain; 2) Casa Del Arte, Istanbul; 3-5) Rose Issa Projects, London; 6) Magnum Photos.