Room to Breathe

As part of a year-long residency at the Migration Museum, and as the first art curator in residence there, I was invited to design and curate The Art Studio, one of 7 rooms in the museum’s Room to Breathe exhibition, and also produce the first residency programme for migrant artists.

During my residency, I wanted to offer an insight into the diverse ways and mediums that contemporary artists work with, and into how the experience in crossing borders and journeying influence and inspire their ways of thinking and creating. Our residency programme for migrant artists, through an open call process, welcomed four individual artists and one artist group to the museum, and The Art Studio hosted one of them each month. Each artist made this studio their own, creating art and sharing with the public fragments of the journey they made across many borders – physical, cultural, linguistic – before landing in London. 

All artists shared their work and process with the museum team and visitors, culminating in a series of art conversations and interviews assembled in an online publication, a curator-artists talk that I produced, and the group exhibition Borderless that I curated. Images and info about Borderless: borderless-art-exhibition

My own art space launched the residency programme and was on display with research materials, art pieces, texts, fragments of different projects I’ve worked on, and some work in progress. The space and sharing offered a glimpse into my research on art and migration, my practice and what stimulates my thinking: museums I have visited, artists that have inspired me, a selection of books I read. In addition, I designed a participatory project that invited visitors to create bridges and leave a trace of themselves at the museum. I also designed an engagement programme and offered tailored workshops to the public and university student groups, and hosted free informal Art Talks. The intimate conversations with visitors that this curated space allowed, nourished a new project I was researching during my residency: We Are Made of People and Places.

Find more about my residency project: www.migrationmuseum.org/the-art-studio-as-a-room-to-breathe/