The gradual disintegration of a clay infant head stands for the erosion of Western bystanders’ empathy in the face of the Syrian Refugee crisis in Amy Foster’s video Safer than the Land. A moving contemporary still life, the decomposition of the head meditates on the harrowing journeys Syrian civilians have to make across the Mediterranean sea and, more specifically, three year old Alan Kurdi’s fatal journey resulting in his death on the sandy shore of Bodrum.

Foster is a contemporary political artist and activist, concerned with the devastating events that are taking place across the world as a direct result of warfare. For the past three years she has followed the Syrian Civil War and have drawn from the events within Syria to inform her practice. Currently, she is working alongside Afraa Hashem, a Syrian Activist whose story of protest and demonstration against President Al Assad was shown in the Oscar-nominated documentary ‘For Sama’.