Cincinnati/OH
HOME ABOUT THE GARDEN HISTORY ABOUT US GRADUATE FELLOWSHIPRESEARCH AND EXHIBITIONS EVENTS HOME ABOUT THE GARDEN HISTORY ABOUT US GRADUATE FELLOWSHIPRESEARCH AND EXHIBITIONS EVENTS
 

Graduate Fellowship


From the words of the inaugural Garden of Refuge Graduate Fellow (2025/6), MFA/MA Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies student Fatemeh Rezaei:

The Garden of Refuge is an interdisciplinary research project and a twin garden located in Dortmund, Germany, and Cincinnati, United States. As a scholar who was based in Germany when the project was first initiated and later moved to Cincinnati to continue my studies in a dual masters program, I carry this project across two contexts that both shape its meaning. The twin gardens create a dialogue between European and American spaces of refuge, connecting my own history of displacement with broader questions of migration, belonging, and ecology. 

I photographed each plant prior to its planting against a black background. These portraits are influenced by typological photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who systematically documented industrial forms with visual neutrality to highlight their shapes and differences (Lange, 2004).  They are also shaped by Vanessa Agnew’s What We Brought with Us: Things of Exile and Migration, published in 2024, which photographs the objects carried by exiled scholars with simplicity and dignity, turning each belonging into testimony of migration (Agnew, 2024).