A sense of belonging: Mosaics from a new portrait of London

Exhibition on migration and memory

In spring and summer 2017, artists, lecturers, librarians, and students at University College London curated and created an exhibition which explored the heavily politicised question of migration from a personal, intimate perspective. In this frame, migration does not appear as a threat for the wealthier part of the world, arising from the loss – of population, expertise, and potential – that less wealthy societies suffer. Instead, migration appears as one of the essentials of human existence: a dynamism of belonging and loneliness, attachment and separation, a sense of a home and an ongoing negotiation of arrivals.

It is the experience of migration that shaped the curators’ and contributing artists’ sense of self over the years. Teachers, academics, and international students at our universities experience some of the same sensations when arriving and departing – from London, from home. The exhibition provided a quick immersion into the migrant experience from a personal perspective while celebrating a self-reflexive approach to relocation, which is inevitably bound up with living through a constant flow of arrivals and departures, with criss-crossing bonds, borders, and boundaries.

The artworks presented elucidated 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 consisted of four parts:

1) The interactive sound and visual installation entitled Homeland(s): real and imagined, by the Cyber Citizens Theatre Collective, offered a unique experience of physical, emotional and intellectual engagement with themes of home and migration. Based on a pilot project undertaken in 2016 by Eszter Tarsoly, Zora Kostadinova, and students of UCL’s global citizenship summer school on intercultural interaction, the two artists, Zuzana Pinčiková and Gabriella Kite collected over 15 hours of oral history recordings with migrant workers, students, teachers, and academics who came to live in London for different reasons in various parts of their life. In the interviews, the artists prompted contributors to reflect on their first impressions of the British capital, the moment when they first truly felt at home here, ideas and objects they brought with them, as well as their feelings after the political changes of 2016. Participants shared stories and experiences of their departures from their homelands and arrivals in London. The final artwork featured a collection of recorded stories of arriving in London, thus documenting the intimate sensations, emotions, and memories that are involved in relocation. Incorporating touch sensors, the installation invited the audience to physically engage with the artwork, by triggering sound through human touch. Explore how these stories were staged and told by objects connected to departures and arrivals here [link to a website or to a video recording on YouTube].

Cyber Citizens is a London-based theatre collective creating interdisciplinary, immersive, and often interactive performances focussing on contemporary social issues. They use new, open-source technologies as tools for creativity and interactive storytelling.

2) Photography by Richard Morgan, a British-born street photographer living in Poland since Brexit, addressed the themes of travel, memory, belonging, crossing borders and shifting perspectives between an outsider’s insight and an insider’s intimate understanding. Having been awarded a PhD from the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Richard is now photographing in the region. He is an award-winning photographer whose street work from St. Petersburg has recently won first prize in the Ben Uri Gallery’s photography competition in London. He has lived and photographed in Russia, USA, China, United Kingdom, and now Poland, where he is working on a street photography project entitled Polacy (The Poles).

Three pieces from Richard’s 2013 series Beyond The Frame were on display at the exhibition. Using double-exposure film photography, these images give visual form to the blurred and fragmented memories of Richard’s travel in and between China and London. Richard’s award-winning photograph from the Ben Uri Gallery was part of a photographic series created in the weeks leading up to Den’ pobedy (Victory Day) in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2011. On the A Sense of Belonging exhibition, this piece was displayed alongside six further photographs from Richard’s London street photography. Being foreign is central to Richard’s style and experience as a photographer, no more so than when he returns to London and tries to look as an outsider on the society and culture he knows so well. Through Richard’s lens, visitors gained a unique perspective on places and cities to which he belongs: a perspective that simultaneously represents the outsider, capturing the typical yet extraordinary in everyday scenes, and the insider, a critical yet compassionate observer of what is disturbing in the familiar. The viewer is taken by surprise by precisely what she knows most intimately: a sharp and unsettling feeling that pinpoints the absurd in the banal, raises questions about what we really know and what we see, ultimately releasing the tension between these sensations into a discerning, heartfelt, transformative laugh.

A former navigator (student mentor) on UCL’s global citizenship programme, Richard returned to the Danube Summer School on intercultural interaction to guide first and second year undergraduate students in thinking about themes of identity, citizenship, and migration through the art of portrait photography.

Richard’s work can be explored on Instagram.

3) The exhibit entitled We Are London: Onlookers and Participants focused on Londoners from eight Central and South-East European communities, specifically on people of Austrian, Slovak, Hungarian, Serbian/Macedonian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish-speaking/Jewish background. Short narratives and portrait photographs by students on the Danube: A Voyage Through the Heart of Europe strand of UCL’s global citizenship summer school programme told the story of these peoples’ arrival, every-day living, and ways of negotiating their position in the British capital. The portraits engaged with the subjects’ identities and selfhoods. They encouraged visitors to think about appearance and personality, attempting to express something of, and communicate something about, the people photographed. The stories accompanying the photographs provided a context in which to understand experience – both of the photographed and of the photographers’.

In addition to the portraits, students also created eight short documentary films about Danubian Londoners, which can be viewed on the Danube-on-Thames website, a blog-writing project which has documented students’ work since 2013 on the Danube Summer School, showcasing not only documentaries but also students’ research and reflexions on language, culture, history, politics, ethnicities, and different patterns of life in the Danube region.

The three winning documentaries of 2017 are the following:

A sample of other documentaries can be explored from various years: Slovak, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Romanian.

4) Robert Czibi, a Roma artist who migrated from Hungary to London in 2010, exhibited aquarelles on the themes of identity shaped by perpetual motion, relationship to space, and continuously shifting perspectives. Four paintings displayed the experience of London as an intimate place of belonging. A perspective that increasingly widens in the four images stretches from the familiar doorway of a home through secretly caught angles of the urban landscape to a broad yet equally intimate London skyline over the River Thames. Another four aquarelles shared reflections on Roma identity as a symbolic place of belonging. From the microcosm a floral-patterned violin and Gypsy horses, objects closely associated with Roma culture and trade in Central and Eastern Europe, to a Roma-patterned world map, these paintings showed in painstaking detail, and through unforgiving yet patient soul-searching, the cosmic attachment to one’s roots – whether old or newly grown, real or imagined. In these two series of four aquarelles ways of seeing places and objects that populate them become synonymous with ways of settling in and feeling at home in these contexts.

Robert 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, then, in 2016, an independent exhibition entitled Vagabonds of Bloomsbury featured his self-reflective work on Roma identity, travelling, and belonging. 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 independent art galleries in Budapest and London. Robert’s contribution to the A Sense of Belonging exhibition included an interactive world map entitled A Pin-Up Portrait of London, depicting the globe as an outstretched version of London’s multi-ethnic microcosm, as well as a collage inviting visitors to answer the questions Have you ever heard an East European accent? What is it like?

The exhibition was co-curated by Robert Czibi, Gabriella Kite, Richard Morgan, Zuzana Pinčiková, and Eszter Tarsoly, with support from Dieter Deswarte, Maria Floruţau, Zora Kostadinova, as well as navigators and students on UCL’s The Danube: A Voyage Though the Heart of Europe summer school.

The curators thank the UCL Festival of Culture, the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, and the UCL Global Citizenship Programme for their generous support.

The exhibition was on display in the Waterstones Gallery on Gower Street from 7 to 30 June.