Once a week, throughout February, I visited Central St Martins which is where I graduated from with an MA last year. I met with staff and students from the Science and Art department and the Museum. Together, we created an exhibition centred around migration which runs for six weeks and begins today. Although all those involved have contributed individual pieces, the curation has been truly collaborative. The works interact and fold into each other wonderfully, emulating the spirit of the intention behind the exhibition. And that is to critique the heavy-handed nationalist reaction of governments here and around the world towards migration, and to provide a more positive narrative.
It’s been good for me to revisit this part of my practice, both here and in a small group show at The Grosvenor Arms recently, where I shared some landscape images taken in and around Calais and Dunkirk, where French and British governments have spent enormous sums of money on policing, fences and border control. One wonders what might have been achieved had they instead spent a fraction of that money on a humane system for registering and processing people who want to come to the UK.
Although my interest in migration and the work I have been doing with AI and found images might look different, their concerns are not so separate: both are focused on the way we demarcate objects/subjects, people and places. Both explore multidirectional opposing forces, some of which include the desire to entrench existing boundaries while others dissolve them. Both query established value systems and ask, I hope, to reconsider what we take as gospel.
Below are some images from the installation which took place yesterday. Do pop by over the next few weeks if you’re in the area. There is some thoughtful work which references personal stories, as well as quotations from Hannah Arendt, Achille Mbembe and Thomas Nail.
Belongings celebrates the contribution of migrants and refugees to British culture. Here, we show work made by refugee artists and makers who have attended the College over the last century, alongside new work by staff, students and recent graduates with migration in their family history. Together, they advance a new experiential understanding of what it means to ‘belong’ in the context of global migration and illustrate the lasting value of the cultural contributions made by those who have moved to the UK. Belongings has been co-created by Susan Aldworth, Sara David, Natalia Mesa Echavarria, Sarah-Jane Field, Silvina Maestro, Julia Shutkevych, Michaelle St Vincent and Judy Willcocks, with support from CSM’s Creativity in Action Fund.
The Belongings exhibition at the CSM Museum and Study Collection will be available to view from 14 March – 29 April 2024
The window gallery is opposite Waitrose at Central Saint Martins, 1 Granary Square, King’s Cross, London N1C 4AA
Installation images by Silvina Maestro