Six artists show work on the theme of courage for our national Refugee Week billboard campaign
Every year in June, towns and cities across the UK come alive with events, stories and creative encounters as part of Refugee Week – the world’s largest arts and culture festival celebrating the contributions, creativity and resilience of refugees and people seeking sanctuary. Counterpoints coordinates the festival, and this year, with support from outdoor advertising specialists JACK ARTS, we invited artists of migrant and refugee backgrounds from six different cities across the UK to respond to the theme of this year’s Refugee Week, courage.
The result is six large-scale billboard artworks displayed simultaneously in six different cities: Sheffield, Birmingham, London, Cardiff, Manchester, and Bristol. Each artist was given a home-city billboard as their canvas, and the works they’ve chosen to share are shaped by personal history, memory, and the courage it takes to build a life somewhere new.
Find out more about the artists below.
Shizza Majeed — Morning Lane, London
Babaji’s Britain, 2025
Shizza Majeed’s billboard is a portrait of her grandfather, a Pakistani man who came to Britain in the early 1960s and, six decades on, still calls East London home. Working across portraiture and documentary photography, Shizza explores how British life has shaped his identity without erasing where he came from. The work challenges narrow ideas of Britishness and affirms the belonging of those who have quietly helped shape this country’s multicultural fabric. Shizza graduated from Kingston University in 2025 and has since been recognised with the Madiha Aijaz Prize and shortlisted for the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain.
Noah Bakour — Womaby Street, Cardiff
I AM A …………. “REFUGEE”
Noah Bakour’s typographic work strips identity back to its most human parts. The piece lists the roles we all carry — son, daughter, friend, neighbour, dreamer — before arriving at the word “REFUGEE,” inviting viewers to sit with the question of what that label crowds out. Drawn from his own lived experience as a Syrian refugee now based in Cardiff, the work is deliberately minimal: no traumatic imagery, just words allowed to carry their own weight. Noah’s films and visual projects often combine poetic storytelling with documentary realism, including his recent feature documentary exploring kindness and welcome in the UK.
Ai Narapol — Arundel Lane/Charles Street, Sheffield
Far From Home, 2025
This portrait emerged from Ai Narapol’s artist residency with RESOLVE Collective x Bloc Projects in Sheffield, where her chosen theme was migration. Photographed on medium format film, the work features Ismail and Mohammed — students from a local English Conversation Club — dressed with pride in their own cultural traditions within their adopted city. Alongside the residency, Ai co-founded UMMAYA, a lived experience-led group using creative practice to support integration. “It is an honour for me to represent refugees in this beautiful city,” said Ismail. For Ai, whose own experience growing up as a migrant in the UK shapes everything she makes, art is a form of communication — one that opens doors and helps heal.
Femi Amogunla — Livery Street, Birmingham
When Pictures Travel Home, 2022
Between 1910 and 1914, anthropologist Northcote Thomas photographed communities across what is now Nigeria. More than a century later, in 2022, those images began a different journey: returning home to communities like Neni, reconnecting families with ancestors known only through memory. Femi Amogunla’s photograph captures the moment a mother and daughter study one of those returned images together. As they look at the photo, they share a reclaiming of history, identity, and belonging. Sometimes courage, the image suggests, is not loud. Sometimes it is the quiet act of looking back and daring to see yourself again. Femi is a Nigerian-born documentary and portrait photographer based in the UK, dedicated to using his craft to spark dialogue and drive social change.
Nisa Chisipochinyi — Princess Street, Manchester
Mamela (Listen/Pay attention), 2024
Nisa Chisipochinyi’s work is rooted in her lived experience of seeking sanctuary through the UK asylum system. Mamela draws its visual language from the Ndebele house painting tradition of Northern Zimbabwe, a centuries-old form of vibrant, geometric storytelling in which each home carries meaning and community memory. Created using naturally derived materials such as clay, berries, and plants – Ndebele murals achieve extraordinary beauty from what nature discards. Nisa transferred her design onto a reclaimed dining room table, itself symbolic: a domestic surface repurposed as a site of story. The title, meaning listen in Zulu and Ndebele, is both instruction and invitation. Through this work, Nisa brings her two homes, Zimbabwe and Manchester, into conversation, and asks us to receive another’s story with openness. When she is not creating art, Nisa is National Head of Equity and Racial Justice at a UK mental health charity and a founding member of the Black Mental Health Manifesto.
Ayan Cimli — North Street, Bristol
Tapestry, part of larger body of work. 2025
Ayan Cimli’s work celebrates the resilience and wisdom of nomadic communities: from the camel-herding Raika of Rajasthan to Somali nomads whose weaving songs carry generational knowledge across continents. The work was photographed by Chandra Passad and made in collaboration with Salwas dhurrie weavers. Ayan is a filmmaker, artist, and co-founder of the Dhaqan Collective, a feminist art collective of Somali women whose work has been presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and beyond. Her practice centres the voices of women and elders, transforming everyday materials into spaces of joy, communion, and healing.
This project is by Counterpoints Arts, supported by JACK ARTS. With thanks to our local Refugee Week partners.
Find events near you at refugeeweek.org
All photos by BUILDHOLLYWOOD.
