Memories of Migration by Sabba Khan
East London Creative People and Places Network is a partnership between the four Creative People and Places programmes based in East London. Colours of Redbridge, Culture Within Newham, Havering Changing, and Creative Barking and Dagenham will each support a group of artists to create new public work for our communities.
Each artist participated in a bespoke training programme designed and delivered by Art School Plus in February 2025. The week-long programme facilitated by artist and Glasgow Women’s Library founder Adele Patrick was specifically tailored to artists working in East London, and focus on the skills and knowledge they’ll need to deliver community-led and co-creation projects in public settings.
After attending the bespoke training, Sabba Khan has been running a series of workshops to take place at Stratford Library with Blossom Group, an organisation that is also part of our consortium. The aim of these workshops are to explore artistic, creative and generative responses to a chosen object that remind participants of their migration histories.
By using memories and oral history, participants will center their lived experiences, and from that point ask broader questions around the impact of Empire and colonisalism. By reframing and re-telling our stories with an artistic lens, participants get to ask themselves and define for themselves how they wish to hold their histories.
For this project, Sabba has drawn inspiration from Stuart Hall’s writing on diaspora as a space of hybridity - the ‘diasporic’ space is not fixed or static but a dynamic and fluid space of negotiation and transformation.
For each of our East London Creative Communities Projects, there will be an artistic outcome. For Sabba’s project, each collection of objects and drawings is to be collated into a series of files that get printed for a zine per person.
Sabba will interpret each object and the stories that have been told through the various mediums into an artistic response per person. A total of 10 object stories will be selected to be transformed into a final fold out zine per person that captures not only the participant’s creative work, but also Sabba’s critical artistic response.
Sabba Khan is an award-winning author bringing together visual art, architecture and storytelling into a practice that asks pertinent questions of our times. Sabba Khan’s “striking” and “impeccable”* debut graphic novel The Roles We Play won the Jhalak prize and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year in 2021. Her graphic novel takes her working-class diasporic roots to interrogate class, race and gender in contemporary life in the UK. Sabba’s work takes you on a journey, one of critical reflection, curious questioning, and ultimately deeper understanding.
About the project partners
East London Creative Communities
Colours of Redbridge, Creative Barking and Dagenham, Culture Within Newham and Havering Changing are part of Creative People and Places (CPP), a national programme from Arts Council England, where local people decide what culture happens in their area. This collaboration in East London champions community-led arts and culture to provide better visibility and creative opportunity across the region.
About Art School Plus
Art School Plus is a training provider and innovator of unique art projects. They are the bridge between artists and projects, supporting the cultural sector and artists with the skills and knowledge to develop mutually beneficial relationships and exciting work. The artists will be supported by Dr Adele Patrick, co-founder of Glasgow Women’s Library, who has been developing innovative cultural projects rooted in equalities and community learning for over 30 years. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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