Politics/Poetics of Migration

Curated by Muna-Udbi A. Ali, Yasmine Espert, Uzoma Ekpunobi, Aaron Joseph and Sheba Wiafe 

Art by Rose-Lynne Amoah, Antonio Berhan Keleta, Ruth Berhe, Jamaya Dixon, Asha Edwin, Pixel Heller, Aaron Joseph, Mosa McNeilly, Sytra Mohammed, Vanessa Oraekwe, Gabriela Sealy, and Natalie Wood.

Two locations: Crossroads Gallery (HNES 283), and Zig Zag Gallery (EUC Lounge).

Politics/Poetics of Migration examines the constitutive role of movement in shaping Black life, culture and resistance across time and space. Tracing histories that extend from the Middle Passage and the Great Migration to contemporary diasporic and transnational formations, this exhibition approaches migration as both a material condition and a poetic world-making practice. 

Presented across Crossroads and Zig Zag galleries, the exhibition unfolds through movement between two distinct yet connected spaces, inviting viewers to navigate the exhibition as a process of passage integral to the curatorial intention. This spatial circulation mirrors the themes of migration, passage and transition that animate the  works on view. 

Engaging in questions of displacement and belonging, borders and crossings, memory and transformation, the artworks attend to migration as physical journey, spiritual transit and social relation. Situated within a political moment marked by climate crisis and global displacement, Politics/Poetics of Migration foregrounds how Black artists trace, remember and reimagine movement, generating new geographies of survival, creativity and freedom. 

Presented by 

The Harriet Tubman Institute, with support from Robarts Centre, Wild Garden Media Centre, and The Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change.

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Host or Publisher Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change