Calling migration a “theme” in contemporary British art already does it a disservice. It’s not a tidy subject you pull down from a shelf. It’s a condition, a rupture, a long, slow ache that alters what can be said—and who gets to do the saying. Britain has been shaped, for decades, by arrivals and departures: the Windrush generation, the Ugandan Asian exodus, the steady eastward flow after EU expansion, people fleeing wars in Syria, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine. Each wave leaves its mark on demographics, yes, but also on the very texture of the nation’s visual culture. The art world, though, tends to prefer its migrants neatly packaged—a poignant photograph, a well-lit painting of a boat, a curatorial statement that reassures without unsettling. The actual story is messier. And far more interesting.
The Artist as Double Witness
The migrant artist works in a strange double register. There’s the world left behind—its smells, its jokes, its unspoken codes—and the world entered, with its own labyrinth of tacit rules. This is not simply a matter of “identity”; it’s a problem of form. How do you paint when the light is different, when the colours of your childhood don’t match the grey of London skies? How do you make sculpture when the materials you trust are unavailable, or carry the wrong associations? The British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye creates figures who are not quite portraits, not quite fictions, floating in a temporal nowhere that seems to question the very idea of belonging. Her work doesn’t illustrate migration. It enacts a kind of refusal to settle, a permanent state of imaginative transit.
Then there’s Hew Locke, born in Edinburgh, raised in Guyana, now deeply embedded in the British art establishment. His extravagant, over-laden sculptures—ships, royal busts, entire processions encrusted with beads, fake jewels, and plastic toys—are a direct commentary on empire and its afterlives. But they’re also an argument about the impossibility of purity. Locke’s objects are mongrels, and they’re glorious because of it. Migration, here, is not a linear story of arrival and assimilation. It’s a baroque entanglement, a refusal to let history sit still.
The Institution and Its Blind Spots
British arts institutions have, in the last decade, scrambled to address their own legacies of exclusion. The decolonisation agenda, the push for “diversity,” the sudden interest in artists of colour—all of this is real, and all of it is fraught. The danger is that migration becomes a box to tick, a quick route to relevance. A big summer show at a major London gallery will feature a room of works by artists from the diaspora, beautifully hung, sensitively lit, and accompanied by a catalogue essay full of the right words. But what happens when the funding cycle ends? When the curator moves on?
Take the 2021 British Art Show, which toured to four cities and made a point of foregrounding artists whose work engages with borders, displacement, and ecological crisis. The intention was serious, and many of the works were strong. But the framing sometimes felt like a protective layer of bubble wrap, softening the blows that the art itself wanted to deliver. A photograph by Alberta Whittle, for instance, shows the artist draped in a life jacket, standing in a landscape that could be the Caribbean or the Scottish Highlands. The image is unbearably direct—a body poised between safety and catastrophe. Yet the wall text insisted on explaining what we could already feel. The best art about migration does not need a translator. It gets under your skin before you have named what is happening.
Landscape as Palimpsest
British landscape painting has a long and rather smug tradition: the green and pleasant land, the rolling hills, the cottage with smoke curling from the chimney. Migration forces a reckoning with this tradition. What happens when the painter is not a native son but someone who arrived last year, who sees the fields not as heritage but as a slightly menacing expanse of wet grass? The Polish-born artist Magda Stawarska, now based in the UK, makes sound-and-image works that layer the sonic textures of different cities—Istanbul, Kraków, Manchester—over film of urban streets. The result is a disorienting sense of place, a landscape built from memory and displacement rather than solid earth.
Consider also the work of Benji Reid, a Manchester-based photographer and choreographer whose images place Black bodies in surreal, often impossible relationships with British domestic and urban spaces. A figure floats above a row of terraced houses. A man balances on a chair in a room that seems to tilt. These are not documentary images; they are psychological maps. Reid shows that migration is not only about crossing a border. It is about learning to occupy a space that was never designed for you, and finding ways to make that space your own.
The Sound of Elsewhere
Art criticism tends to privilege the visual, but some of the most compelling work about migration in Britain today is sonic. Lawrence Lek, born in Frankfurt to Malaysian parents and now living in London, creates virtual environments and soundscapes that explore what he calls “Sinofuturism.” His 2018 work Nepenthe (Welcome to the Metaverse) is a CGI film set in a dreamlike motorway service station, populated by avatars who speak in multiple languages. The piece is about transit, about the non-places that migrants know intimately—airport lounges, holding centres, the back seats of long-distance coaches. Lek’s sound design, all humming engines and disembodied announcements, creates a low-level anxiety that anyone who has ever waited for a visa decision will recognise.
Sound bypasses the polite distance that visual art can sometimes maintain. It enters the body directly. The British-Somali musician and artist Elmi Ali uses field recordings from Mogadishu and London, weaving them into dense compositions that refuse to let either place become a mere backdrop. In a recent installation, listeners sat in a dark room while sounds of rainfall, market chatter, and Quranic recitation moved around them. The piece was not about contrasting two worlds. It was about the impossibility of leaving either one behind.
Who Gets to Speak, and How
One of the ugliest debates in British art circles concerns authenticity. Who has the right to tell a story about migration? Must the artist have lived it? The question is loaded, and the answers are rarely simple. A white British artist who makes work about refugees risks accusations of appropriation or sentimentality. A refugee artist who makes work about their experience risks being trapped in that identity forever, expected to perform trauma on demand. The market loves a good story of suffering overcome, but it has little patience for complexity.
The painter Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad and came to the UK as a refugee. His paintings are large, dark, and deliberately obscure. They hint at violence—a chandelier that might be a weapon, a shadow that might be a body—but they refuse to explain themselves. In interviews, Sami has pushed back against being read only through the lens of his biography. He is a painter, not a case study. Yet the art world keeps trying to pull him back into the box marked “exile.” This is the trap: the demand that migrant artists perform their otherness, then the punishment when they decline.
On the flip side, some of the most vital work about migration in Britain is being made by artists who are not migrants themselves but who understand that the condition is now central to what Britain is. Jeremy Deller’s 2016 project We’re Here Because We’re Here, which placed thousands of volunteers in First World War uniforms in public spaces across the UK, was a meditation on historical memory. But it was also a quiet commentary on the presence of soldiers from across the empire, men who crossed oceans to fight for a country that would later deny their grandchildren entry. Deller’s work is not “about” migration in any narrow sense. It simply assumes that migration is part of the story, not a special episode.
The Gallery as Border Zone
Physical spaces matter. A gallery in Peckham is not the same as a gallery in Mayfair. The former exists in a neighbourhood shaped by decades of Caribbean, African, and more recently Latin American migration. The latter is a shrine to money. When artists from migrant backgrounds show their work in these different contexts, the meaning shifts. A painting that speaks of displacement in Peckham might read as community testimony. The same painting in Mayfair becomes a luxury object, its politics safely contained by the white cube.
Some artists have responded by refusing the neutral gallery space altogether. Rebecca Chesney, though not a migrant artist in the biographical sense, has long collaborated with asylum seekers and refugee support groups to create works that exist in meeting rooms, community centres, and public parks. Her project Border Lands involved walking the edges of the UK—coastlines, administrative boundaries—with people whose legal status was precarious. The resulting maps and photographs are deliberately unspectacular. They document not drama but the slow, grinding reality of living in limbo. This is migration art that refuses to perform for the art market.
Against the Grain of Nostalgia
Britain is a country drowning in nostalgia. The Brexit vote was, among other things, a howl of longing for an imagined past. That past was always white, always orderly, always somewhere in the shires. Migration art, at its sharpest, is an antidote to this fantasy. It insists that the past was never pure, that the countryside has always been crossed by foreign feet, that the city has always been a collision of languages. The photographer Ingrid Pollard has been making this argument since the 1980s. Her series Pastoral Interlude places Black figures in the Lake District, directly confronting the assumption that the English landscape belongs to white people. The images are beautiful and deeply unsettling. They ask: who is out of place here, really?
Younger artists have taken up Pollard’s inquiry. Hannah Starkey photographs women in urban settings—cafés, bus stops, underpasses—with a careful attention that refuses both glamour and pity. Many of her subjects are women of colour, and the images capture moments of waiting, of suspension. These are not scenes of high drama. They are the ordinary textures of diasporic life, and that ordinariness is a political claim. To show a Muslim woman sitting on a bench in a London park, doing nothing in particular, is to insist that she belongs there. Not as a symbol, not as a problem, but as a fact.
Language and Its Failures
Art criticism has a language problem. The available vocabulary—“hybridity,” “liminality,” “transnationalism”—has been worn smooth by overuse. These words once had sharp edges, but they have become academic wallpaper. The artists themselves are often far ahead of the critics. Zadie Xa, a Canadian-born artist of Korean descent living in London, makes work that mixes Korean shamanism, marine biology, and speculative fiction. Her installations are full of fabric, video, and sound, and they refuse any single interpretive key. You could call them “hybrid,” but that word fails to capture their strangeness, their refusal to be easily consumed.
Perhaps the most honest thing to say is that migration changes art in ways we are still learning to name. It is not a genre or a movement. It is a pressure that alters the shape of everything it touches. British art without migration would be not just poorer but unrecognisable. The question is whether the institutions—the galleries, the funding bodies, the magazines—can catch up with what artists are already doing.
FAQ
How has migration changed the subject matter of British art?
It has not simply added new “themes” but has forced a re-examination of what British art considers its own traditions. Landscape, portraiture, and history painting have all been unsettled by artists who see the land, the body, and the nation’s past through the experience of displacement. Works by artists such as Ingrid Pollard and Hew Locke directly challenge nostalgic versions of Britishness, while younger figures like Mohammed Sami refuse to let their work be reduced to biographical testimony.
Do British art institutions treat migrant artists fairly?
Only partially. There has been a surge in exhibitions and funding dedicated to diaspora and decolonisation, but the risk of tokenism is high. Migrant artists are often expected to perform their otherness on demand, and their work can be framed by curators in ways that soften its critical force. When the institutional spotlight moves on, many artists find themselves back at the margins. Real equity would mean sustained support, not just timely programming.
Can someone who is not a migrant make meaningful art about migration?
Yes, but it requires deep research, humility, and a willingness to cede control. Jeremy Deller’s collaborative projects and Rebecca Chesney’s work with asylum seekers show that artists can engage with migration without claiming to speak for anyone. The key is to treat migration not as a special topic but as a central condition of contemporary life, one that belongs to everyone living in a country shaped by centuries of movement across borders.
What role does sound play in migration art?
Sound can bypass the visual clichés that often trap migration art. Artists like Lawrence Lek and Elmi Ali use field recordings, music, and ambient noise to create environments that evoke the disorientation and layered memory of migrant experience. Sound installations can place the audience directly inside a state of transit, making them feel the low-level anxiety of waiting, the jolt of an unfamiliar language, the comfort of a remembered voice.