All Our Stories

To those who are dispossessed, space becomes a devouring and threatening force that pursues, ensnares, and encircles. Treated as the locus and product of dynamic interaction, for migrants, space is politicised—a place where their bodily perception, human rights, and futures are destabilised, or violently reimagined. The concept itself of ‘outsider’ or ‘intruder’ serves as a fetish mobilised to define the borders and boundaries of given communities. In All Our Stories, contrary to traditionally prejudiced narratives about migrants, space is viewed as a multidimensional field in which narratives intersect through visual encounter.

The entire exhibition was thoughtfully curated, leaving a notable somatic effect—salient works include a wall of UK newspaper headlines reporting on the migrant crisis entitled Chart of Shame (2016) created by journalist Liz Gerard, who notes: “It is easier to blame ‘the other’ than ourselves for all that is wrong with society.” The sheer scale of the wall, showcasing glaring headlining titles from: ‘STOP Migrants,’ ‘We Can’t Keep Them Out,’ to ‘Criminals Free to Live in Britain’ left a lasting effect. Media coverage of the migrant crisis continues to manipulate language, feeding into phenomenological dichotomies of inside/outside, invader/ invaded. 

In light of recent racist violence targeting migrant communities and ethnic minorities across the UK, the showcasing of works like Gerard’s Chart of Shame becomes increasingly important. CEO of the Migration Museum, Sophie Henderson, notes: “On an almost daily basis, we see how conversations about migration, race, and belonging can become heated and polarising.” Shows like these are not only important in their ability to platform untold or otherwise villainised stories, but they also seek to humanise migration in a way that media coverage avoids.

Ella Krispel’s woven paper tapestry, consisting of newspaper prints from articles on migration, also seeks to emphasise biassed media coverage, alongside the almost narcotised numbing effect, words like ‘illegal,’ ‘crisis,’ or ‘influx’, seem to have in relation to migration. Krispel’s tapestry, a work defined by its care aesthetics, addresses both psychological and political perception in the present, weaving harm into something that, while seemingly comforting, ultimately reveals itself as a veil of oppression: a subtle indictment of the media's complicity in perpetuating harmful narratives.

Angela Hui restructures her parents’ Chinese takeaway shop, including details like a pile of school workbooks under the counter, that Hui would work from between taking orders, a framed hygiene certificate, and empty tins of Lyle’s Golden Syrup filled with chopsticks. Alongside other artists in the Settling section of the exhibition, Takeaway (2022) critically engages with the cultural and political charge that food has in relation to migration. Becoming a powerful tool to engage with one’s own heritage, in the case of Takeaway (2022), food is a means of survival, contention and reiteration of cultural difference. Hui notes: “I must reconcile with why the Chinese restaurant was born. They were not created from a love of food or passion, but out of necessity.”

All Our Stories carefully considers how the act of migration extends beyond the initial journey, and outwards towards further integration, inclusive of the realities of isolation and endurance. In the absence of a homeland, one experiences home in other ways: food, other people, charged sites. The delocalised home-land, takes on the symbolic form of a takeaway-shop for Hui, providing comfort. Though ‘home’ can never be distanced by virtue of its entanglement with memories of the past, affirmation of one’s home through food, or other cultural relics, open up empathic connections through their re embodiment in the present imagination. Consolidation is not something found in the past, but rather, something that emerges through a negotiation of past memories, in the present. 

Memory politics requires art to recognise the memoric imprints space might hold, embodying a rhetoric of forgiveness. Shows like All of Our Stories confront this difficult task, not only of memorialising trauma, meeting a history of oppression and violence, but also holding space for new narratives. In grappling with concepts of belonging, All Our Stories reimagines ‘home’ not as a “utopian” site— but as a condition dependent on a set of relationships which locates one to oneself.