Bold Mellon Collective bring Queer Migrations back to Queen's House

Bold Mellon Collective return to the Queen's House with Queer Migrations 2026

A year on from a sold out first edition, the collective bring a new ensemble performance to Greenwich this Saturday, made in direct response to Crossings, the museum's new display on migration and the borders that outlast it.

Queer Migrations began life at the Queen's House and it is going back there. Bold Mellon Collective, the anti-disciplinary arts trio behind the project, first staged it last year as a showcase of individual pieces. This time round the approach has changed completely. Emilia Nurmukhamet, HEAVADNY, Chen Xu and Oscar Rodriguez have spent a month and a half meeting weekly to build one ensemble work together, with movement direction and sound by Dear Annie and costumes and photography by Amy-Rose Edlyn.

The performance responds to Crossings, a new selection of eleven works now on show at the Queen's House, curated by Tim May. The display is split across two rooms, one following the process of maritime migration and one its aftermath. You hear it before you see it: Shore to Shore, a sound piece by Güler Ates made with Leyla and Yusuf Huysal, drawn from the story of a Turkish refugee family's exile, seeps through both rooms. The collective got to sit down with Ates and with Shorsh Saleh, whose painting Crossing Border draws on his own experience of crossing borders in search of safety, and that conversation shaped most of what they've made.

It's still a work in progress and the group are treating that openly. This is a first sharing, not a finished piece. All four performers, Emilia Nurmukhamet, HEAVADNY, Chen Xu and Oscar Rodriguez, joined us for the conversation, and answered together throughout, sometimes as one voice, sometimes with one of them picking up a question and the others adding to it.

Q&A

Matt: What was your first reaction walking into Crossings, and how did that start shaping this year's performance?

Bold Mellon Collective: It felt like a completely different room to the rest of the museum, we noticed that straight away. There were pieces we just stood in front of in silence for a while, taking it in rather than analysing it, because that work had already been done for us. The soundscape hit first, before we'd even reached the room it was coming from, and it set the tone for everything else.

Matt: Was there one artwork that changed the direction of the piece?

Bold Mellon Collective: We had the privilege of speaking to two of the artists, Shorsh Saleh and Güler Ates, and that conversation shaped most of what we've made, more than the artworks alone. It wasn't only about their process, it was about how it feels for migrant creatives to have their work living inside a space like this. There was also a small photograph of a young girl travelling by boat, set inside a very wide white frame, and that gave us the idea that runs through the whole piece: framing. How do we frame this performance, and how are we, as queer migrant and diasporic creatives, being perceived right now.

Matt: You talked about how the museum's maritime focus shapes this project. How is showing these stories in a maritime museum different to showing them in a gallery?

Bold Mellon Collective: This project was born in this museum, so it's specific to it. Last year's stories were pitched directly for this space, after a lot of conversation with the people who work here about why it matters to tell these stories in a building like this. It would be a different piece somewhere else. We're bringing ourselves to this specific history, not just performing in front of it.

Matt: What's changed in your approach since last year?

Bold Mellon Collective: The biggest thing is that we're working together this time. Last year it was individual pieces brought into one showcase evening. This year it's one ensemble, built from all our separate voices mixed together until it sounds like one. We met every Friday for a month and a half, which gave us space to actually live with the work instead of locking ourselves away for two weeks, and that felt like a real gift.

Matt: This year it's a single event rather than a full festival. Why the change?

Bold Mellon Collective: Feedback, mostly, ours and the artists' from last year. Not the most exciting answer, but it's the honest one.

Matt: Migration is so often told through visual art. What was hardest about bringing it into live performance?

Bold Mellon Collective: With visual art you put a lived memory onto a canvas once. With performance we're reliving it, putting our bodies through it again and again. Working out how to look after ourselves afterwards is the harder part. But performance is naturally fluid and always changing, and that felt right for a piece about movement and migration.

Matt: What do you want someone who's never experienced migration themselves to take away from this?

Bold Mellon Collective: This work is for queer migrants first, so we want them to feel held. But if you haven't experienced migration directly, you still have a connection to the systems that uphold borders. We'd want you to leave asking why you're not doing more. Movement is a pretty natural part of being human, even if the stakes look different depending on who's moving and why.

Matt: Who do you want to apply to the Queer Migrations Art Book, especially people who don't see themselves as artists?

Bold Mellon Collective: Anyone with any relationship to the word artist. It can be a work in progress, notes app entries, doodles in a notebook, all of that counts. We want people from outside London too, because being queer and a migrant in London is one experience, and being queer and a migrant somewhere else is a completely different one.

Matt: What's the deadline, and how can people apply?

Bold Mellon Collective: Monday 20 July. There's a form on our Linktree, Instagram and website, but if forms aren't your thing you can send a voice note, a video or an email instead.

Matt: Where would you like to see Queer Migrations go beyond this year?

Bold Mellon Collective: We'd love to take it on tour and hear how people around the country respond to it. The sharing on the 18th is twenty to thirty minutes, we'd love to see it grow into an hour, and there's talk of turning it into a film too.

Quickfire

One word for what Crossings means to you.
Fluidity. Movement. Together. Transition.

If Queer Migrations was a colour, what would it be?
Purple. Forest green. Neon purple. Maroon.

First place you felt like home in the UK.
A tree in Greenwich Park that overlooks a little hill.

Photo by @amyroseedlyn

Queer Migrations 2026
Saturday 18 July 2026
Queen's House, Royal Museums Greenwich
Performances at 12:30pm and 2pm
The 2pm performance and Q&A will be BSL interpreted. All events are relaxed, with sensory toys and earplugs available.
Free tickets available here.