England as a foreign country – looking for Streets of Gold

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Rosalind Ormiston finds the streets are paved with art at the Museum of London

The ‘outsider’ aspect of living in a foreign country is experienced by any person who chooses to live in a country not of their birth; that feeling of separation from home, culture, friendships and family. In that respect the experiences of five artists currently showing at the Museum of London could speak for all migrants, wherever they choose, or need to live. In the large and dark square of space on the lower ground floor of the Museum of London, four remarkably different works expose these artists’ visual response to the city of London. What is exciting in ‘Streets of Gold’ is to observe through the installations of paintings, drawings and sculpture, photography and film, the diverse reactions each has had to the experience of living in Britain.

‘Streets of Gold’ at the Museum of London (until 15 April 2012) displays the work of five foreign-born artists. It is a smaller exhibition than ‘Migrations: Journeys into British Art’ at Tate Britain (until 12 August 2012), which concentrates on a body of work produced in Britain by foreign-born artists from the second half of the 16th century to the present day. ‘Streets of Gold’ explores art and migration in Britain, interweaving the personal experiences of each artist, Alberta Whittle from Barbados, Golbanou Moghaddas from Iran (now living in Scotland); New Zealander James Voller; and, working together on this project, Serbian-born Bojana Jankovic and Romanian artist Dana Olarescu. In each of the four installations the artists incorporated items from the Museum of London’s own collection.

Alberta Whittle’s content-rich installation see no evil, hear no evil. speak no evil, considers ‘the misappropriation of images of transatlantic slavery’. She includes a large montage of images from two 18th-century paintings in the Museum of London’s collection: A Negroes’ Dance in the Island of St Dominica by the Italian painter Agostino Brunias (c.1738-96), which presents ‘a sanitised version of slaves working in West Indian plantations’ and Taste a La Mode, by the French artist Louis Philippe Boitard (active 1738–63), a satirical comment on taste and fashion in 18th-century London.

‘Souvenir’ postcards of this work are found adjacent, in a circular stand. Migrant visitors are invited to take a card and write a response to the question, ‘When does London become home?’ The many postcards returned to the stand reveal their views, for example, ‘London started to feel like home when I didn’t want to go back “home” for Christmas’; ‘When I got a job and could pay my rent’; ‘When you stop getting lost’... and many more, which give personal insights into lives of migrants in Britain.

Golbanou Moghaddas’ large scale wall installation Between Water and Wind interleaves a print, London from the Roof of Albion Mills, from the museum’s collection and the words of William Blake and Omar Khayyam with her drawings and texts, interwoven across a contemporary panorama of London’s winding River Thames. She states, ‘I translated my own journey from East to West into this river painting through London...’.

Close by is the combined work of Bojana Jankovic and Dana Olarescu, who both studied theatre direction in their own countries before meeting on an MA course, Performance Making, at Goldsmiths College, London. Their interest in theatre and Performance Art is reflected in the choice of objects from the museum’s collection.

In Waste of Space, hundreds of play-texts over 100 years old are, in the artists’ words, ‘trapped inside the museum’s Ephemera Collection’. They are displaced, stacked up against the wall, ‘gathering dust’. It was Jankovic and Olarescu’s idea to ‘give them a voice’. The book piles lie underneath a toy theatre and above, from an audio installation can be heard the books’ texts spoken by actors, where the plays ‘audition’ for retention in front of a West End panel. It is an intriguing piece of theatrical entertainment and one with a deeper message on the displacement felt by migrants. 

The fourth installation is the work of James Voller, a migrant from New Zealand who studied photography at the University of Canterbury, England. His experience is perhaps unique. In 2011 he had just arrived in London when he heard that his hometown, Christchurch, had been largely destroyed by an earthquake on 22 February. In the aftermath he considered how people reconstruct their lives in a city after a disaster.

In Redefinition, Voller draws parallels between Londoners’ living through the Blitz in 1941 and residents of Christchurch. Featuring original images of the Blitz, three wall-size photographs illustrate people and buildings. In each, a small door hatch, when opened, reveals a short film extract of various individuals speaking about their own experience in Christchurch, but their words are dubbed with Londoners’ voices. It links 22 February 2011 to 29 December 1941, to illustrate how tragedies in cities, across time and place, create universal experiences. 

The exhibition has been brought to the Museum of London by a partnership with the arts and migration organization motiroto. Their Creative Director Daniel Saul believes that the display is a reminder that ‘London has been built on successive dreams of newcomers and that we should treasure fresh perspectives’. His words sum up a fascinating display of migrant artists’ works, directly related to their lives in Britain.