Upcoming Exhibition: Transnational Diaries

Autumn 2026

Peltz Gallery
Birkbeck, University of London
43 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD

The exhibition Transnational Diaries combines text and photo collages to portray the everyday lives, stories and journeys of Chinese migrant traders who run family-owned shops in Belo Horizonte, a city in southeastern Brazil and the capital of the state of Minas Gerais.

The exhibition began in the streets of Belo Horizonte, in an area known as the hypercentre, where the research project Globalisation from Below: Livelihoods, Trade and Transnationalism in the Brazilian Informal Economy was conducted. Historically a place of trade and a point of arrival for different migrant populations, the area is today marked by an intense concentration of popular commerce, catering largely to low-income and working-class consumers. It is also a space where the boundaries between formal and informal economies are often blurred, forming a kind of grey zone in which regulations are negotiated and state tolerance is uneven.

The materials on display were produced in workshops with first- and second-generation migrants. They take the form of an installation made from 36,2  linear metres of printed fabric suspended from the ceiling. Images and texts are woven together to create a topography of transit, following movements of people, goods, memories and relationships across places and generations. The choice of a light, foldable material was deliberate. Conceptually, its mobility evokes the transnational migrations, kinship networks, exchanges, friendships and geographical connections running through these stories. Practically, it allows the exhibition itself to travel: to be folded, packed, transported and reassembled elsewhere.

A first journey brought the stories and experiences gathered in the streets to a local museum in Belo Horizonte. Now, transported across the Atlantic to the Peltz Gallery in London, the exhibition makes its own transnational journey. In a new city and a new space, the stories it carries encounter different audiences and acquire new meanings.