a community arts festival
foregrounding how bodies, identities, and stories move across borders, seas, and generations.
Taking place from July 9th - August 9th across Royal Museums Greenwich, Firepit Art Gallery and PARKSfest 2025, the festival centres the experiences of queer people who have journeyed, fled, or resettled, often in search of safety, freedom, or belonging.
By highlighting the resilience and creativity of queer migrants—past and present—Queer Migrations invites audiences and attendees to consider how histories of movement shape queer life today. Through performances, workshops, and community-led events, Queer Migrations asks us to reflect on what it means to move — and to be moved — as queer people in a world shaped by borders.
“What the Festival showed, again and again, is that queerness and migration aren’t just labels — they’re living, breathing realities that shape how people love, create, survive, and imagine new ways of being. Especially in the UK, where the migrant experience can be full of gatekeeping and exclusion, that space to reflect, connect and be fully seen felt not just powerful — but necessary.”
QUEER MIGRATIONS PERFORMANCE EVENT
Commissioned artists showcased live-art performances in response to the exhibits and archive of The National Maritime Museum.
Abel Atsede
Bichu - An exploration of a lost soul trying to find peace in the storm.
In collaboration with Phosphoros Theatre.
Oscar Rodriguez
My Only Last Destination - A ritual space of mourning, joy, and resistance, speaking back to colonial histories with tenderness and rupture.
In collaboration with CamReal, Ry Rush & Cuttfruit.
Chen Xu
Museum of Ellipses - A site-responsive performance, where displacement traces imperial echoes.
In collaboration with Matthew Schwarz & Yui Minari.
Emilia Nurmukhamet
weight of waiting - Dressed for a ceremony without end, this journey is a restless reckoning with estrangement.
Music & Videography by Dear Annie, poem read by Emilia’s Davanika, Alfya
OUR AUDIENCE SAID
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OUR AUDIENCE SAID 〰️〰️
“A wonderfully joyous experience”
“An honour to witness such personal and intimate stories”
“Profoundly moving”
“Dynamic, brave, powerful, unapologetic”
OUR AUDIENCE SAID
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OUR AUDIENCE SAID 〰️〰️
“Greenwich became louder, bolder, funnier, queerer, and more activist in spirit. This is what socially engaged practice can look like: art that doesn’t just speak to people but works with them, creates with them, and hands over the mic. In doing so, it shifted the curatorial frame from above to below, from an institutional narrative to a lived one”
QUEER MIGRATIONS EXHIBITION
Artists have been invited to explore what it means to move — or be moved — as a queer person. What gets left behind, and what do we carry with us?
The Queer Migrations Exhibition opening celebration, featured Live Music performance by STAND!BACK (Jo Fraser & Chris Clarke).
Exhibiting Artists: april forrest lin 林森, Elisia Brown, Elvira Pushkareva, Jae Lim, Lapis Al-Shammaa, Lenka Kalafutova, Misha Zakharov, Nat Sultan, Rishi Khurana, Tasalla Tabasom, Yaya.
Exhibition attendees said:
“extraordinary”
“can’t be more timely”
“made me feel motivated to create”
“In the crush of queerphobia, transphobia, anti-migrant and anti-refugee violence in the UK and austerity-induced scarcity in the arts, what safe, communal spaces do queer migrant artists have? The Queer Migrations Festival currently taking place in southeast London is one such sanctuary,”
LECTURE: Painting international law
Queer Migrations Festival opened with a captivating and illuminating lecture and discussion on using art for expressive visualisation of international law, with Professor Dr. Elvira Pushkareva
Lecture attendees said:
"inspiring”
“insightful and thought-provoking”
“For those of us shaped by both migration and queerness, something stirs here. A recognition. A rupture. A sense of belonging not built on sameness, but on survival, contradiction, and the radical act of showing up in multiplicity.”
WORKSHOP: Mapping Our Roots
An interactive workshop with Touch Grass C.I.C
Led by Toni and sage, Participants Reflected on their own journeys and created maps of belonging through nature and art, culminating in a collective sanctuary celebrating queer resilience and connection
Workshop attendees said:
"welcoming”
“affirming”
“a deep sense of community”
“At its core, Queer Migrations invites the public to imagine new ways of relating to borders, language, ancestry and place. It offers both a space for healing and a call for collective action, led by artists whose voices and visions deserve to be heard and held”
Workshop: Zine-Making
with sold out publishing and Plan B
Participants Created their own zines, exploring themes of migration, queerness, and othering through simple design and binding techniques.
Workshop attendees said:
"Absolutely fantastic”
“informative and inclusive”
