Giving Voice: Michael Fullerton's portraits of asylum seekers

Joma Ahmadi’s story began in the dry grasslands of Afghanistan. In 2021, his government was forcibly overthrown by the violent Taliban, triggering mass evacuations, and fleeing families. In his lifetime, his country has been afilliated by civil war, terrorism, and international interventions, leaving little room for comfort of the working man. Formerly making his way as a stone carver, he left his life behind for the uncertain path of migration. We meet Ahmad in the historic English border town of Carlisle, where he is seeking refuge. He resides at Hilltop Hotel, affectionately named to inspire ideas of a utopic destination, wrestling with a fate hung on opaque bureaucratic processes of the UK asylum system, 3,500 miles away from home.

Ahmadi is one subject of many in a series of portraits completed by Michael Fullerton in his newest exhibition, held at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 1 March. The Glasgow-born artist worked and lived at Carlisle’s Hilltop Hotel in 2023 for five months as an assistant manager, and later worked in the kitchen, while the hotel engaged in a Home Office contract to house asylum seekers. During his time at the hotel, Fullerton formed relationships with the migrant residents, many of whom agreed to sit for the portraits now on display in Scotland’s capital city. Lining the walls of the City Art Centre are Fullerton’s intimate oil paintings of men hailing from Iraq, Georgia, Eritrea, Sudan and Syria, altogether a community in the modest Cumberland city.

In this space, the individuals and personalities of asylum seekers are given rare, vivid focus and through it, their stories are demystified. Eleven portraits spaced across an entire floor gives you time to linger with each distinctive painting. Fullerton, known for his portraiture, does not simply paint the subject, but captures what you come to feel is the person’s nature, whether it be his ease or his severity. Ayeman Al Rasheed, one of around 4,000 UK asylum applicants from Syria in 2023, is painted looking pensively towards the viewer with his hand to his face, grey speckling his hair and beard.

Altogether, Fullerton presents 11 profoundly personal paintings. Yet, outside this room, rumblings of an averse agenda are mounting across Scottish society, and men like these are vilified in its debris.

“Send them home!” chanted a group of 1,000 anti-immigration protesters in Falkirk this summer, targeting Hotel Cladhan, which is involved in a similar contract to that of Fullerton’s workplace, housing asylum seekers. Following a resident's conviction for sexual crimes against a minor in the town centre, the hotel became a target for a Facebook group who organised a series of protests and eventually attracted racist, Islamophobic and violent abuse towards all hotel residents.

Anti-migration protests on smaller scales have emerged in Aberdeen, Perth and a well-reported 'Unity Rally' on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, organised by right-wing online influencers.

The origins of this volatile hatred can’t be tracked to one source, but one can follow a trail of inflammatory news cycles, bubbling conspiracy and a society plagued by financial insecurity, leading to one supposed enemy – the monolith of the asylum seeker.

While migration figures are primarily accounted for by international students, economic migrants and health and care workers, outrage ensues over the public budget spent housing those fleeing hardship. With the first successful Reform candidate in Scotland elected in West Lothian this winter, it's clear there is growing sympathy for a far-right movement once seen as fringe in Scottish society.

Sweeping changes to asylum policy introduced by Westminster, including a 20-year path to settlement, forces Scotland into a harsher migration system for those seeking asylum. This is a moment the nation is forced to look inward, as it reckons with how it treats those seeking refuge within its borders. In a landscape crowded by voices claiming to speak for migrants, Fullerton's simple portraits stand as radical, political art.

The third floor of the City Art Centre holds a curated archive of the Glasgow artist’s prints. 20 years of Fullerton’s screen printing work cements his legacy as a political artist, while the Hilltop Hotel series adds to his collection of work used to challenge power, and provide alternative perspectives to the collective memory.

Hilltop Hotel underwent its own period of division, with anti-asylum protesters waving signs outside the hotel painted with the same scripted claims of asylum seekers abusing handouts and prompting violence against women. By 2024, Hilltop Hotel halted its public service and closed to asylum seekers. In this small town tale, Fullerton’s work is documentary, and places a compassionate lens severely missing in the public eye on an overlooked population: its cultures, its quiet resilience and distinctive individual stories. With his careful brush, the artist subverts the mediated asylum seeker, too often reduced to a caricature, and instead places them in the gallery space.

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Michael Fullerton, City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until 12 Apr, open daily 10am-5pm