An image showing four hijabi black women, two dressed in red and two in white, posing on the top of a hill in Switzerland.

Central Saint Martins

UAL Showcase Collections

Beyond Borders

fish tank with goldfishes inside swimming around

With her documentary film Takeaway, Lin Chen wants migrant parents to know that their stories are worth telling. We watch her father carry supplies through the door of Newport Chinese Take Away, and inside, an interior dressed with warm reds and golds, and ornaments familiar to many through our experiences with food. As orders ring in and the dishes of their homeland are prepared, cooked and packed, we hear Mr and Mrs Chen’s stories. Professional pasts in China and the practical realities of their resettled lives – language as a barrier to choice, circumstances dictating the future, working hard to make a living, a 10-hour day every day until their children finish uni, and only then will they retire. This work is a celebration of ordinary, hardworking people and their silent sacrifices for a life in the UK, co-existing with acceptance and appreciation.– Cat Cooper

Takeaway (外賣)  

What do migrant women need from local urban environments? This is the question at the centre of Maggie Yung’s work, Heaven/Haven for Her, which uses the existing Minores car in Aldgate as a site of inspiration. Yung tackles the challenges migrant women face when moving from one city to another — safety, language barriers, cultural differences, and unfamiliarity with local services. – Diyora Shadijanova

Heaven/Haven for Her

Chloe’s womenswear collection speaks to the contradictions and layers rooted in her dual culture and identities formed of their environments that must then be fought for. Recycled rice packaging and fragments from old football jerseys feature alongside deadstock neoprene, layering up with delicately illustrated print motifs, cultural patterns and contrasting 3D-printed sculptural forms. Offering a proud and unapologetic expression of growing up a second-generation Chinese immigrant, Chloe is inspired by fellow Chinese women who retain and defend their identities. A sense of performance, autonomy and rebellion inhabit the collection, reclaiming power and place.– Cat Cooper

BE THE PHOENIX AND THE DRAGON

A vibrant digital artwork displays a group of figures interacting with large structures.

MullenLowe NOVA Awards 2024

The phrase &quot;let me land&quot; is one commonly recognised as part of Black British vernacular. Osei examines the phrase – which means to let a person “finish a sentence or thought when being interrupted” – within the context of urban redevelopment in south London. Nearly half of Peckham&#39;s population identifies as Black, Black British, Caribbean or African and houses the highest diasporic community in Southwark. Osei asks how such immigrant communities can be heard and engaged with, allowing them to land in a new place and make a home without struggle or opposition. – Diyora Shadijanova

Let Me Land

holding a phone using the "profiles" interface

Working with the women living in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement, Uganda, Isabella explored how mobile technologies could be harnessed to overcome barriers to people’s engagement with health knowledge in the encampment community. She designed the Afya app to make healthcare and health information simple for the women in camp, so that understanding and communicating about one’s health becomes an everyday practice, instead of a crisis need in illness. Afya recognises that in fragile situations, context is key. A simple mode option takes away all complexity to make access to the contents a simple click away. A secure database digitises patient files securely and makes them accessible on and offline. What is important here is that the app recognises all parts of the population’s care, connecting between traditional healers, Village Health Teams and Medical Providers.With a built-in search engine, a chatbot named Amani answers an individual’s health questions, points them to the best service, makes appointments and guides the user through their health journey. This is not just a health intervention, but a way of working that provides cultural and individual agency that reframes how health knowledge is owned and engaged with. – Cat Cooper

Re-centering Refugees in their Healthcare 

A B&W portrait image of a Persian woman crossing her arms and facing the camera outside on the street. 

In I Am Talking to You, Setayesh Kamrani-Masoleh explores the Deaf Persian immigrant experience, focusing on the intersection of language, identity, and displacement. Drawing deeply from personal history — her parents’ immigration from Iran two decades ago — the work speaks to the broader, often overlooked narratives of Deaf immigrants navigating cultural and linguistic isolation. Kamrani-Masoleh juxtaposes past and present, reflecting on how societal attitudes toward immigrant integration have shifted over time. Central to the piece is the artist&#39;s meditation on technological advancements, such as video calling and text-to-voice speech, which have redefined communication and accessibility, bridging gaps that once seemed insurmountable. – Diyora Shadijanova

I am talking to you

Two twin tiles with afro romanticist inspired imagery.

A Lisbon-born artist of West African descent, Tatiana’s art places printmaking and generative AI images on ceramic tiles and concrete. The hardness and inflexibility of the materials reflect brutal colonial histories, referencing artefacts and pieces of history taken from their place and lost forever to the African diaspora. We see through the artist a romanticism that exists without the colonial past. A twin pair of silkscreen prints on concrete reconstruct glimpses of time, narrative, and religion through an Afro-diasporic lens. An implied utopia, to counter an unimaginable burden? – Cat Cooper

Pesos Inimaginaveis 

Female model wearing black blazer jacket, black lace scarf, red black white and yellow wrap top and assorted scarf, and jeans.

Sabreen Hassan&#39;s work explores the collective loss migrant communities often experience when settling in a new country – one of a distinct identity. “Even though North Africa and the Middle East covers a large range of nationalities and identities, in the UK, we form a collective community,” she says, reflecting on the homogenisation of the North African and Middle Eastern immigrant experience in the West. As a third-generation Egyptian immigrant, her work allows her to reconnect with her culture and identity as a British Egyptian and revive traditional design practices in her work. – Diyora Shadijanova

Ann Hassan

4 Black Hijabi women manspreading on top of a mountain

Through a sweet documentary and vivid portraiture of a group of young friends, Safa Zanad demonstrates to the collective Swiss imagination, the media and anyone who might have overlooked it that the brown, the black and the Muslim women of the Swiss population are ordinary Swiss nationals. Disrupting the familiar Swiss landscape, she makes brown and black people the face of ‘Swiss-ness’. Her mountain photoshoot and candid musings between friends about being Swiss show how silly it is to question their nationality. With their own gaze at the centre of this work, Safa redefines the position of Muslim women in the Swiss public sphere. What is Swiss-ness, after all, if not a love for the people and places of the land where you were born and grew up, which comes across loud and clear in this joyful work? – Cat Cooper

The Ordinary Swiss

Exploring diasporic Nigerian identity with collage, photo transfer and painting.

Painting Diaspora is an investigation into African diasporic identity in Britain. The artist explores their Nigerian and Ugandan heritage through personal and archival imagery displayed on mixed-media pieces. I love the use of colour and layering of texture in the final piece; it evokes a sense of history, memory, and the multi-dimensional nature of heritage. – Diyora Shadijanova

Painting Diaspora

Participants act in an immersive performance, to experience the situation of an immigrant by the border in the Airport.

Through storytelling, film and performance, Mohsen translates the emotional process of leaving one country for life in another, reflecting on the state of being a human at the point of departure, immigration and passing through borders. Passports are poems, containing travel histories, connections, identities and a connection between past, present and future. Throwing out the theory that airports are mere transitional spaces – or non-spaces along a way, we experience airports in the context of the immigration journey, places that leave a permanent mark – the impression of finality and loss at what is left behind, stepping into something yet to be revealed, waiting to be checked and stamped and cleared to progress into the unknown. – Cat Cooper

Living, Leaving, and always Leaving! 

The image shows a colourful postcard with the front being a designed poster of the film, and the back a quote by the drycleaner.

Dedicated to the East and Southeast Asian diaspora, Steam Steam Day Up! recreates a day in the life of second-generation British-Chinese dry cleaner Tony Chung, who owns Haggerston’s longest-serving local business – The Steam Room. &quot;The title of the film originates from the literal translation of the Chinese idiom, 蒸蒸日上, which uses the imagery of steam to imply a gradually flourishing life,&quot; the artist explains. The concept of &quot;steam&quot; in this work refers to the store’s name and the largely overlooked history of British-Chinese immigration, evoking the journeys of early immigrants — sailors who arrived on steamships, cooks skilled in preparing steamed dishes, and launderers who steamed clothes. This recurring motif of steam is a thread that connects generations of Chinese immigrants in Britain.– Diyora Shadijanova

Steam Steam Day Up! 蒸蒸日上

A photograph of a quilt hanging on a red timber stand outside of a vacant building on Hackney Road.

Architecture student Ellie designs for a future where care for one another is the foundation of our society and economy, based on values of sharing intergenerational knowledge, lived experience and feminist principles. Working with Happy Baby Community, which provides antenatal and postnatal support for women seeking asylum in the UK, her itinerant model of maternity care for women during pregnancy and after childbirth shows how we could facilitate community-led healthcare provision based out of urban high streets. As the welfare state expires, her Quilting Bee: Itinerant Maternity Trust would transform vacant high street buildings into vibrant community maternity care centres, forming an important site of social and public life. Through quilting together, Ellie mobilises care from the personal towards the collective, creating and communicating a sense of belonging. – Cat Cooper

The Quilting Bee: Itinerant Maternity Trust 

Empty room with a small wooden bench placed in the centre of sun rays entering the room.

Jiayue Jenny Li’s photographic series The Space You Leave Behind delves into the emotional landscape of loss and memory, as she returns to her grandparents’ village following her grandfather&#39;s passing. Through intimate reflections on the presence and absence of objects — like her grandfather’s cherished stool or the spaces in which wardrobes and dressers — Li captures the quiet yet profound traces of a once-lived life. Her work poetically evokes what she refers to as &quot;the marks that absence leaves behind,&quot; transforming everyday items into poignant symbols of grief across borders, memory, and the enduring impact of absence.– Diyora Shadijanova

The Space You Leave Behind

Orange weave placed in shape of Palestinian headwear 

ORANGE DIASPORA offers an intimate perspective on Palestinian women&#39;s role in society, highlighting their strength in domestic life as well as wider Palestinian history and resistance. Traditional elements of Palestinian culture — vibrant colours, intricate patterns, and textiles — are reimagined in this design to resonate within contemporary contexts.The final work draws inspiration from traditional Palestinian headwear and reflects the rich heritage of women&#39;s traditional activities, such as basket weaving, Jaffa orange harvesting, and embroidery. It is made of mixed orange materials such as straw and wool, held up by a base of strong fabric, while the design is strongly influenced by the shapes of carved-up orange peels. I love this work because it reflects on the richness of cultural tradition yet is entirely innovative in its approach and experimentation. – Diyora Shadijanova

ORANGE DIASPORA

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