A/HRC/52/35 Through the paintings, each group can express its identity and the message it wishes to convey to the community. During the creation phase, pairs are created: for example, members of the Haitian community are paired with women from the Cercles des Fermières du Québec and elected municipal officials are paired with people from the French language learning centre, which brings together students from over 30 countries.29 B. Challenges of migrant artists 36. As artistic expressions are vehicles to develop and express one’s world view, feelings and meanings, they need to be disseminated and made accessible in order to contribute to communication. However, there is a general underrepresentation of migrants in the cultural expressions created, produced and disseminated in most host countries, whether in traditional media or on digital platforms providing cultural content. 37. Migrant artists face significant obstacles in accessing the appropriate resources, means and tools to create, produce and share their cultural expressions, both within their group and within the host society. They often talk about their invisibility in the host society and its arts world. It is reported that when the State promotes international art and culture and even when they promote art on migration and displacement, there are extremely few initiatives that support refugees who are actual artists and whose needs are for professional support as artists.30 38. Sometimes, migrants have difficulties in having their status as artists fully recognized. At times, their precarious financial situation and their difficulties in accessing governmental financial support programmes for the creation and production of cultural expressions restricts those expressions. Some arts councils and cultural ministries have a mandate to offer arts funding only to citizens of their countries.31 Panels deciding on scholarships or funding are often comprised of experts in the host country’s arts and turn away from foreign or different art. Bias, conscious or unconscious, about what is good art, as well as priorities set by governments, for example to promote national history or specific causes, work against migrants’ artistic expressions. 39. Migrant artists also do not often have the cultural networks, knowledge or means to promote their work in a way that is suitable in their new context. Hence, their art continues to be invisible even in the areas where they live. The positive contribution of migrants to the flourishing of diversity of cultural expressions, and of cultural diversity in general, within the territory of a State is not frequently highlighted and cultural policies are rarely mobilized to emphasize this. However, those policies play a fundamental role in the intercultural dialogue between the host society and migrants. 40. Migrant artists have usually fled their countries abruptly and without proper documentation, so they are forced to go into hiding from the authorities and are thus unable to access their host country’s social and cultural life. Such migrant artists are in a state of limbo, unable to fully participate in their host country’s creative economy. Instead, they are struggling to secure legal documentation,32 emergency funding and, for those artists who are in a third country where they remain at risk, seeking to relocate to a country where they are truly safe and secure.33 The difficulties are often even greater when artists and other migrants settle outside urban centres, as state-of-the-art creative and production tools may be inaccessible. Barriers to accessing and understanding information on dissemination channels and establishing relationships with cultural actors are further amplified by language barriers. Physically accessing places of creation, production or dissemination of cultural expressions 29 30 31 32 33 GE.23-01011 See submission by the UNESCO Chair on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions at Laval University, Quebec. See submission by PEN America. See submission by Mary Ann DeVlieg. See submission by Artistic Freedom Initiative for examples in the United States of America. See submission by PEN America. See also Manojna Yeluri and others, “Connecting the dots: artist protection & artistic freedom in Asia” (2022). 9