Uncertain Grounds: Reframing migration in Europe

Across Europe, migration policies increasingly shape the conditions under which people work, sustain family life, and imagine their futures. The I-CLAIM exhibition brings together newly commissioned artworks that explore these realities through moving image and photographic practices, offering perspectives on migration that move beyond policy debates and statistics toward the textures of everyday life.

Developed within the I-CLAIM research project, the exhibition engages with questions of legal uncertainty, labour precarity, and public narratives surrounding irregular migration. While public discourse often focuses on borders and moments of political crisis, the research behind the project highlights the more subtle and enduring ways migration governance structures daily experience — from precarious work and restricted mobility to the emotional pressures faced by families navigating unstable legal status.

The exhibition presents works by Alicja Rogalska, Chris Costa, Anna Knappe & Amir Jan, Ieva Baltaduonytė, Jana Shostak, and Radu-Mihai Tanasă. Working primarily with video and photographic media, the artists engage with themes emerging from the research through their own artistic languages and conceptual approaches. Rather than illustrating research findings, each work reflects an independent artistic process that interprets, questions, and expands the issues explored by the project.

The artworks address different dimensions of irregular migration, including platform labour in urban delivery economies, migrant labour in agricultural sectors, family life under conditional residence status, and the ways migration is represented in public discourse. Moving between observation, collaboration, and speculation, the works reveal how migration policies intersect with intimate aspects of everyday life.

Each artwork commissioned by Centrala was first presented in an individual exhibition in the country where the research was conducted — including the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Bringing these works together for the first time in Brussels, the exhibition creates a shared space to reflect on the diverse realities of migration governance across Europe.

The exhibition forms part of the wider I-CLAIM project, a European research initiative investigating the living and working conditions of irregularised migrant households. The research is conducted by Utrecht University, University of Birmingham, University of Helsinki, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, University of Warsaw, and the Catholic University of Applied Sciences Mainz.