Recent far-right riots in the U.K., fueled by misinformation and culminating in large anti-fascist marches this summer, have underscored the critical role of art in confronting narratives around immigration.
This fall, London hosts a powerful series of exhibitions that delve into the immigrant experience, countering the mainstream media’s often dehumanizing portrayal of refugees. These shows illuminate diverse stories and, collectively, offer a poignant, universal message—a stark contrast to the climate of hostility seen on the streets.
Last month, the Migration Museum inaugurated its new London location in Lewisham with “All Our Stories” (until December 2025), a survey of artworks like the sculpture Waiting II by Shorsh Saleh, a row of chairs sinking into the ground that evokes the uncertainty of sitting by while impersonal bureaucratic processes determine your future. Other educational installations include a tent inviting visitors to immerse themselves in the sounds and sights of a refugee camp in Calais, a major port connecting France with the U.K.
Lucky Star installation by Angela Hui at “All Our Stories” exhibition at the Migration Muesum in London. Photo: Elzbieta Piekacz.
Another installation by writer Angela Hui is modeled on Lucky Star, the Chinese takeaway restaurant that her parents ran after settling in Wales in 1988. When Hui was growing up she and her brothers helped out behind the counter, which has been faithfully recreated, taking orders over the phone in between finishing their homework. A T.V. in the corner plays a video of Hui’s mother making spring rolls while recounting her journey from China through Hong Kong to the U.K. By picking up the phone and dialling different numbers, visitors can also hear more stories from other second-generation immigrants who grew up in family-owned businesses.
“It was a surreal experience,” Hui said of installing the work, which she describes as “a love letter” to Chinese takeaways. “I would never have thought to see my story in a museum. I just wanted to document the almost thankless job of working in an immigrant-owned hospitality business.” These beloved local restaurants in rural white areas are “often people’s introduction to a different cuisine, the building blocks for their palates to explore new things,” Hui added. Yet, “we don’t often get to see them as having any cultural importance.”
Swedish artist Lap-See Lam grew up in her family’s restaurant Bamboo Garden in Stockholm, and the Chinese restaurant’s position in the Western imagination has long been a subject of interest to her. For her current show at Studio Voltaire in Clapham (until December 15), she presents a film inspired by the Sea Palace, a three-story floating Chinese restaurant that was eventually abandoned and became a spooky attraction at a Swedish amusement park, where it was known as “a ship from the Orient with a thousand year curse”. For Lam, who is representing Sweden at the 60th Venice Biennale, it is a site to explore displacement and loss as well as well as to imagine new Cantonese mythologies.
Installation view of Lap-See Lam, Floating Sea Palace at Studio Voltaire in London, 2024. Photo: Andy Keate, courtesy of the artist and Studio Voltaire.
Inaugurating the new Reflections Room at the London Museum Docklands is Exodus, a sculpture by British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové, launching November 29 (until May 2025). A wooden table top crammed with toy figurines of cars, trucks, humans, and wild animals all apparently in gridlock rests on Castrol oil drums. Nearby walls will be covered in maps documenting historic networks of trade, tourism, and migration between 1500 and 2005, leaving the viewer to infer how these sweeping global movements relate to each other.
“The history of mankind demonstrates a knowledge of humans walking freely around the Earth, often leaving in large numbers,” said Ové in a press statement. He added that this work is “about the movement of people from African countries, which is symbolic of all people who find themselves in exodus. All vehicles and dolls face the same way as there is only one way out, one way to leave, and only one hope of a future elsewhere.”
The artist’s rarely exhibited snapshots of London’s Black communities will also be included in Tate Modern’s “The 80s: Photographing Britain,” opening November 21 through May 5, 2025.
Over at the Wellcome Collection in Euston, the survey show “Hard Graft” (until April 27, 2025) examines how different forms of labor impact our physical and mental health. A newly commissioned sonic work, Care Chains, by Vietnamese artist Moi Tran, was produced in collaboration with The Voice of Domestic Workers. This U.K.-based support group advocates for the thousands of migrants, predominantly women, who arrive each year from countries like Kenya and the Philippines to work for private households. The artwork uses percussive movements like claps, stomps, and clicks, in an expressive, joyous choreography that centers the body as an instrument—one that feels the toll of providing urgent, arduous, and often invisible care work.
Installation view of Moi Tran, Care Chains (2024) in the exhibition “Hard Graft” at the Wellcome Collection in London. Photo: Wellcome Collection/ Steven Pocock, 2024.
Some institutions in London are preserving untold histories of migration that reveal how its influence on Britain is nothing new. 19 Princelet Street, a house in Spitalfields, was built in the early 18th century for a Huguenot silk merchant who had emigrated from France due to religious persecution. It later became a synagogue, with a basement used for antifascist meetings in the 1930s. Following conservation work, 19 Princelet Street is set to open to the public as a record of the ways in which so many waves of immigration have shaped the East End.
A singular story is spotlighted in “Belongings” (until November 8) by Susan Aldworth at The Arcade, Bush House in the West End. “What does it feel like to leave your home forever?” the exhibition asks, considering the case of Aldworth’s Italian grandmother Luigia Berni who, at the age of just 23 in 1924, moved to London with her young baby. The artist has imagined the contents of the small suitcase in which she carried essentials and vestiges of her old life, embroidering family photographs and stories onto 35 pieces of antique clothing.
Just a stone’s throw away from Bush House, at St Mary le Strand church, renowned stage designer Es Devlin presented Congregation from October 4-9, in partnership with the U.N. Refugee Agency, The Courtauld, and King’s College. The animated installation emerged from a months-long project that saw Devlin welcome 50 Londoners into her studio, all of whom have at some time in their lives been refugees. Each is the subject of a chalk and charcoal portrait.
Installation view of Es Devlin, Congregation at St Mary le Strand church in London in October 2024. Photo: Daniel Devlin.
Participants came from all over the world, including Myanmar, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ukraine, and some chose to recount their stories (their voices filled the cosy chapel). Maya Ghazal, for example, sought asylum in the U.K. from the Syrian civil war and is now training to become a commercial pilot. Dame Stephanie Shirley arrived to the U.K. via the Kindertransport in the late 1930s and, discovering in herself a great love of computers, became a leading businesswoman in the I.T. sector.
Speaking to Artnet News while in the midst of the project in May, Devlin said the portraits are mainly about “porosity between ourselves and others.” She revealed that she is working with The Policy Institute at King’s College in the hope of supporting “systemic change” that might reduce the great peril that refugees subject themselves to, for example when journeying across the English Channel on small boats. “That [mission] is ambitious, but that’s what the work has got to be about.”
For those who missed the brief window to see “Congregation”, Devlin is presenting the same installation and new works from the project as part of “Face to Face: 50 Encounters with Strangers,” a free exhibition opening at Somerset House on November 23 until January 12, 2025. Concurrently, The Policy Institute will hold public discussions with leading researchers on asylum and migration policy as part of its season “Lost & Found: Stories of sanctuary and belonging.”