A Sense of Belonging: Mosaics from a New Portrait of London

As part of the UCL Festival of Culture you are invited to the opening event of an exhibition exploring questions of migration from a depoliticised perspective.

Wednesday 7 June, 6.00-7.00pm

The exhibition explores the fiercely debated and politicised question of migration from an intimate, personal perspective through artworks and stories told by migrants in London. These narratives allow the elucidation of a new portrait of London: an image that emerges from a mosaic of recollections of the ways in which the city appears to those who arrive here for the first time. The exhibition will also feature eight portraits of Danubian migrants to London taken by students on the The Danube: A Voyage Through the Heart of Europe strand of UCL's Global Citizenship Programme.

This exhibition is supported by UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL Grand Challenges, the CEELBAS consortium, and UCL Global Citizenship Programme.
Artists

• CyberCitizens Theatre Collective

The Homeland(s): real and imagined (interactive installation)

About the project: The Homeland(s): real and imagined is a work-in-progress interactive sound and visual installation offering a unique experience of physical, emotional and intellectual engagement with themes of home and migration. Part of this project is a dialogue with the participants who have shared stories and experiences of their own departures from their homelands and arrivals in London. The final artwork will feature a curated collection of recorded stories of arriving in London, told by the participants as well as literary characters. Incorporating touch sensors, the installation invites the audience to become active players by physically engaging with the artwork triggering sound by human touch.

Cyber Citizens is a London-based theatre collective founded by Gabriela Kite and Zuzana Pincikova with an aim to create interdisciplinary, immersive and often interactive performances focussing on contemporary social issues. We are using new and open-source technologies as tools for creativity and interactive storytelling.

• Robert Czibi

Robert is a Roma artist who migrated from Hungary to London in 2010. He has participated twice before in exhibitions at UCL, first as part of a show entitled East European-ize: London under East-European Eyes in 2015, and with an independent exhibition on Roma identity, travelling, and belonging in 2016. His work has been exhibited at London's Park Theatre and at New York University on the Opre Khetanes Romani Art and Music Symposium in 2016, as well as in various art galleries in Budapest and London. Robert's contribution to the current exhibition includes an interactive map depicting the British capital as a mosaic-like microcosm of the global world, as well as paintings on the themes of homeland, belonging, identity, and how it is all shaped by arrival in London.

• Richard Morgan
  

Richard Morgan is a British photographer living in Poland in the wake of Brexit. Having been awarded a PhD from the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, he is now photographing in the region. Richard is an award-winning photographer whose work from St. Petersburg has recently won the Ben Uri Gallery's photography competition. He has lived and photographed in Russia, China, USA, and now Poland where he is working on a street photography project entitled 'Polacy' ('The Poles'). Richard will be returning to the Danube Summer School to guide first and second year UCL students in thinking about themes of identity, citizenship, and migration through the art of portrait photography.

The exhibit entitled We Are London: Onlookers and Participants focuses on eight newcomers from eight Danubian communities (Austrian, Slovak, Hungarian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish-speaking/Jewish) through a series of portraits made by students of UCL.

His own contribution to the current exhibition consists of photographs that deal with questions of travel, memory, home, loneliness, crossing borders and transgressing boundaries.

Mosaic image (C) Flickr user 'Dun.can' (CC BY 2.0).