London Photo Gallery - Lewisham Shopping Centre

Lewisham is less than 10 minutes by rail from London Bridge in the city's southeastern reaches. It is a diverse area, with minorities accounting for 1/3 of the population, so it is the right location to house the Migration Museum. There are 2 pieces of the Berlin Wall right in front of the museum with artworks by Thierry Noir and STIK. These segments were installed in the late 1970s as part of the wall's 4th generation and stands 3.6m high. Thierry illegally painted over 5km of the wall from 1984-9 to give a more colourful and ridiculous take on the otherwise sad divide, an act of artistic resistance. The artwork symbolizes friendship to all, encouraging dialogue across divisions to find what we all have in common. The museum has been located in the Lewisham Shopping Centre since 2020. Renatha Hoga designed this slice of cake to reflect on the refugee's experience, capturing her first memory of home in the country. This exhibit features bus routes from Hong Kong's KMB plotted over the city's map, reflecting the tangled network of memories and connections that migrants take with them. The distance between Hong Kong and the UK is about the same as the KMB's bus network. Maggie Williams is a 2nd generation migrant and designed this rice bag filled with spaghetti to reflect her complexities of not being able to speak the language of the culture she feels most associated with. This artist who grew up in Canada took inspiration from photos used for previous visa applications with the paintings done from acrylic on latex to reflect Vietnam's colonial legacy and his sexual identity. This Hong Kong-born artist uses passport photos from different places to highlight what you see as a good representation of yourself may not meet imposed expectations, such as the official photo standards. This artist left Iraqi Kurdistan and moved through a number of countries illegally to seek asylum in the UK. It took 8 years for the case to be accepted in the UK after "seemingly endless waiting" for solicitors, court dates, and letters from authorities while sitting on a chair and waiting. The museum explains the different types of migrants and is quite up-to-date with a box on the recent BNO scheme for Hong Kongers to move to the UK.