Lights and Shadows: an exhibition on welcome, absence and the promise of community sponsorship
9 June 2026
Ten years of community sponsorship in Europe, ten pictures to invite us to look more closely at how Europe tells stories of welcome. Rather than offering a simple celebration, this exhibition from the QSN+ European Sponsorship Convention asks a harder question: who makes it into the picture, and who remains out of frame?
Europe is often keen to showcase “success stories”: families reunited, students graduating, neighbours sharing meals, communities proudly welcoming a refugee family. The photographs in this exhibition, curated by Efat Abulfazil, come from precisely these moments. They document the everyday beauty of community sponsorship – a first snow, a shared table, a bike lesson, a family portrait – and remind us that safe pathways and close‑knit support can make ordinary life possible again after displacement.
But the drawings next to them, made by Maninelkaos, remind us that these are “necessary but incomplete images”, as their curatorial text states. For every sponsored student or family whose journey ends in a photograph, many others are stuck at borders, in camps or detention, in dangerous journeys at sea, or lost in years of administrative limbo. The drawings that accompany the photos are meant to evoke those absences. They do not illustrate what we already see; instead, they hint at what lies outside the frame – the shadows cast by each joyful image.
Ordinary life as an extraordinary achievement
The exhibition is structured around a series of simple words – Friendship, The Thread, Winter, The Table, Home, Freedom of Movement, Graduation, Rescue, Waiting Room, Lights and Shadows – each paired with a short text that connects the visible scene to a wider reality.
Friendship shows how a single encounter can transform a trajectory of displacement into a story of belonging, while recalling that many others on the same route are intercepted and returned to places of violence and arbitrary detention.
Winter presents an ordinary day in the snow, yet points to the thousands who still face deadly borders and to the tens of thousands who have died or disappeared along migration routes in recent years.
The Table honours hospitality around shared food, even as millions of displaced people continue to face food insecurity and malnutrition.
Home captures a family portrait, reminding viewers that finding safety is not an end point but the beginning of rebuilding a life after crossing deserts, conflict zones and multiple countries.
Taken together, these scenes underline a central idea of the exhibition text: what appears “small” – a home, a meal, friendship, studies, work – can become essential steps in healing and rebuilding after displacement, and should be normal for everyone.
Safe pathways – and the people left behind
Other images explicitly contrast the protection offered through community sponsorship with the dangers still faced by people without access to safe pathways.
Freedom of Movement and Rescue juxtapose bicycles and leisure boats with perilous journeys in trucks, containers or fragile vessels on the Mediterranean; they also allude to the growing criminalisation and restriction of rescue itself.
Waiting Room evokes a circle of people teaching someone to ride a bike, using this intimate scene to highlight how sponsorship shortens the distance between arrival and belonging – yet noting that many others continue to spend months or years waiting for decisions that will determine where and how they can live.
Lights and Shadows returns to the reality that across Europe, many people seeking protection still spend long periods navigating asylum and residence procedures, with bureaucracy itself becoming another border.
In this way, the exhibition constantly links sponsored pathways to the wider protection landscape. It is clear that community sponsorship “works” – not because it promises extraordinary opportunities, but because it restores ordinary life. At the same time, the installation refuses to ignore those who never make it into these images.
Questioning the meaning of “welcome”
The curators emphasise that Lights and Shadows does not present welcome as an act of charity. Instead, it invites visitors to question what “welcome” really means in a Europe where safe pathways remain limited, borders continue to wound, and key conditions for dignified reception are still missing in many places.
The exhibition suggests that a society should not be measured only by its most successful stories, but by the fate of those who remain invisible – the people pushed back at sea, detained, exploited at work, or caught in endless procedures. By placing drawings of absence alongside photographs of presence, it asks us to hold both realities together. The light exists. So do the shadows.
Community sponsorship in focus
Presented alongside the Convention programme – with its policy discussions, breakout sessions on evidence, regions and active citizenship, and an evening panel centred on lived experience – the exhibition offered a visual and emotional counterpart to the debates in the room. It reminded participants that community sponsorship is not only a set of regulations or funding lines, but a web of human relationships in which small gestures accumulate into life‑changing support.
At the same time, Lights and Shadows grounded the celebration of “ten years of community sponsorship in Europe” in realism. It acknowledged the limits of current programmes and the ongoing violence of borders, while insisting that sponsorship remains one of the clearest proofs that another way of welcoming is possible.
For ICMC Europe/Share Network, the exhibition is both a tribute and a challenge: a tribute to sponsors, refugees and communities who have transformed each other’s lives, and a challenge to ensure that the conditions depicted in the photographs – home, safety, friendship, study, work – become the rule rather than the exception in Europe’s response to displacement.