Visit the People’s History Museum this Summer to explore the perils and personal stories of migration featured in the venue’s new British Museum Spotlight Loan exhibition, Crossings: community and refuge.

Currently on display until Sunday 5 September, this free-to-view exhibition features the Lampedusa Cross – a wooden crucifix created with wood salvaged from a migrant boat carrying Eritrean and Somali refugees that was lost off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa in late 2013.  The piece is one of 300 made by Italian carpenter Francesco Tuccio to remember the refugees who sadly lost their lives during the tragedy.

The exhibition also includes Dark Water, Burning World – a new installation by Syrian-born artist Issam Kourbaj which aims to shed new light on the incredibly dangerous journeys undertaken by refugees fleeing areas of crisis. To illustrate this very pertinent issue, Kourbaj has created twelve small boats, each packed with burnt matchsticks to evoke images of people tightly-packed into small spaces, with their scorched heads representing the scars carried by individuals forced to flee their war-torn homelands.

This free exhibition is currently on display at People’s History Museum’s Left Bank venue until early September. To find out more, visit the museum’s website or watch the video below highlighting the themes of the exhibition and the significance of the Lapedusa Cross.

A Manchester Wire Partnership post
Sat 29 May - Sun 5 Sep, 10am - 4pm, People's History Museum,
Left Bank, Manchester, M3 3ER
, Free
www.phm.org.uk
Words:
Simon Bland
Published on:
Sun 20 Jun 2021