These days, migration touches almost everyone in one way or another. It is part of our everyday life now. And what I like about these artists is that they don’t try to make it bigger than it is. They talk about it the way people talk about real things: honestly, through small stories and personal details.

This text is just me looking at how they do that — how artists from the Arab world put the experience of moving, leaving, or starting again into their work.

I suppose you know the work of Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Khalili. The Mapping Journey Project (2010–13) is one of those works that stays with you because of its clarity and understatement. It is just eight videos, all filmed the same way: a hand, a paper map, and a marker slowly tracing the route of a long, complicated journey across the Mediterranean and beyond. The people drawing these lines are refugees and stateless individuals Khalili met over three years of moving along major migration routes — in Marseille, Ramallah, Bari, Rome, Barcelona, and Istanbul.

She didn’t chase anyone down or treat encounters like “finding subjects.” She walked, she got lost, she waited. And as she explains, “Sometimes they find me rather than I them… The encounter occurs from the moment I accept to get lost in a city. And from that moment, there are lots of conversations… The approach I have developed over the years to avoid pathos and sentimentality is listening. I only ask a few questions, but they are always factual and precise.”

That last part tells you everything about her method. She doesn’t “interview” in the conventional sense. She holds space. She listens. She lets the person decide how the story should unfold. And in the videos, the migration story becomes the drawing itself — a hand moving across a map in real time, charting a path that took months or years to walk.

With this, she pulls migration away from dramatic headlines and places it back in the hands of the people who lived it. A journey becomes a line. A route becomes a memory you can literally trace.

The project closes with the Constellations series, where those same drawn paths reappear as star-like patterns — silkscreen prints that turn dangerous routes into something resembling old mythological skies. It is a quiet gesture, but it changes your relationship to the map. Instead of thinking “this is what they went through,” you catch yourself thinking, “Where would I be on this line? What if this were my path?”

By the way, Khalili has said she has never considered The Mapping Journey Project a work about migration. It is a way to look at how people resist the nation-state model — a system built on borders, checkpoints, and constant decisions about who belongs and who doesn’t. In her view, this model creates entire groups who are pushed outside citizenship, denied equal rights, and even stripped of the right to move.

French-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada was born in Paris to Moroccan parents and grew up in Tangier. Before turning to art, she studied political science, and photography came into her life almost by accident.

She once explained that while working in the West Bank — researching roadblocks and the ways people tried to negotiate crossings with the military police — she began taking photos simply to document what she was seeing. Over time, the balance shifted: she was making more images than notes, and photography slowly became the clearer language for what she wanted to understand. Art, she realised, allowed her to approach political realities with more freedom than academic writing ever could.

Her series A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (1998–2004) focuses on everyday life in Tangier, a city that looks directly onto the Strait of Gibraltar — a stretch of water that, for many, represents the possibility of Europe. Before Spain joined the Schengen Agreement in 1991, crossing the Strait was relatively simple; afterwards, it became heavily restricted. The place turned into a symbol of separation, even though it is only a few kilometres wide.

About what drew her to this subject, Yto says: “What inspired me is I looked through my window and that is what you see. You see a border, you see all these discussions about the Mediterranean Sea, the mother of all seas, the fact that we all come from the same place, all these discourses about love and sharing, and the actual situation is much more violent.”

And now, Yto Barrada will represent France at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026 — a fitting stage for an artist who has spent her career looking carefully at the spaces that connect and separate us.

Syrian-French artist Bady Dalloul approaches migration quietly, through details and the small structures that shape people’s lives. He is not interested in dramatising movement; instead, he pays attention to the systems around it: borders, documents, invented geographies, the stories families pass down.

This shows up clearly in his long-term project, Land of Dreams, developed in two chapters — one in Tokyo and one in Dubai. In Tokyo, he looks at the city through the eyes of people who arrive and slowly try to find their footing, often without the language, the right documents, or a clear sense of where they fit.

How does he capture both his own migration experience and the wider histories that surround it? He does it through collages, and through something much smaller and more intimate... matchboxes. Inside these tiny containers, he places his drawings, turning them into miniature scenes that hold the weight of memories, news images, and everyday observations.

He started drawing inside matchboxes in 2016, when images of the Syrian civil war were everywhere in France. As he says, it became a way to process what he was seeing — to take these overwhelming images and hold them in a space small enough to grasp. Over time, the drawings moved beyond the war. They began to include glimpses of his days in Tokyo, people he met, things he noticed on the street, and moments from his own life that lived side-by-side with memories of Syria.

By now, he has created around 800 of these miniatures. Each box becomes its own little world: part diary, part archive, part coping mechanism. And there is something very honest in that choice of scale — as if he is acknowledging that migration isn’t one big story but a collection of tiny, scattered impressions you try to carry with you.

The second part of Land of Dreams, made in Dubai, is called Self-portrait with a cat I don’t have. It grows out of the same impulse but looks outward rather than inward. If the Tokyo matchboxes show the private process of absorbing and sorting memories, the Dubai works reflect the experience of arriving in a city built almost entirely by people who have done the same. Two chapters, two angles — but both grounded in the idea that migration is made up of small moments, not grand narratives.

The Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury approaches migration from a different angle — through the body, and through physical space. She grew up between Lebanon and London, so movement isn’t abstract for her; it is something she has lived from the inside. Because of that, she never tries to “explain” migration in her work. Instead, she creates situations where you can sense it — where the body understands what words often fail to show.

One of her most striking pieces is As Far As My Fingertips Take Me. You are seated on one side of a wall; a performer — a refugee — is on the other. You never see each other’s faces. You hear a voice, you feel a hand drawing on your arm, and you realise that the whole work is built around a barrier. It captures something very real: how migration often turns into a conversation interrupted by borders — you can hear someone clearly, you can almost touch them, but the wall stays.

The project captures something very real: how migration often turns into a conversation interrupted by borders — you can hear someone clearly, you can almost touch them, but the wall stays.

Another work, Cultural Exchange Rate, is more like moving through a private archive. El Khoury uses her own family story — a border village between Lebanon and Syria, old documents that went missing, currencies that suddenly became worthless, relatives who left for Mexico generations ago. All of this becomes an installation built out of small lockers that the audience opens one by one.

Inside each box, there is something different: a letter, a sound recording, a piece of paper, a small object that once crossed a border or failed to.

Together, they build a kind of fragmented archive — very similar to how migration stories actually live inside families. Some memories stay sharp, others fade, some don’t match up at all. And you move through this archive with your own hands.