Free entry
15 Jul - 6 Sep 2026
Common Rooms
| Monday | Closed |
| Tuesday | 11am–6pm |
| Wednesday | 11am–6pm |
| Thursday | 11am–9pm |
| Friday | 11am–6pm |
| Saturday | 11am–6pm |
| Sunday | 11am–6pm |
Common Rooms offers a free space to sit, read, chat, relax or do some work. It provides sofas, a large table and a plethora of books. Throughout Backyard Biennial, the Common Rooms will host:
Migration Museum: All Our Stories
An interactive user-generated display of the Migration Museum’s Story Discs invites visitors to share their own experiences of migration.
The Migration Museum wouldn’t exist without people’s stories. This interactive display represents just a few of the thousands of personal migration stories shared by visitors over the years.
Material Crimes Listening Station
This listening station is designed by artists Frederick Kannemeyer and Felix Taylor, based on the podcast series Material Crimes, created by QMUL researchers Maia Holtermann Entwistle and Sharri Plonski. The series takes a deep dive into the material crimes that shape the lives of colonised, racialised and marginalised communities everywhere, and explores how they are mobilising for different, liberated futures.
Whitechapel Radio Station (WRS)
A Backyard Biennial: East edition of Whitechapel Radio Station (launched in 2023) will showcase special audio features, artist and collaborator interviews, playlists and takeovers by local partners.
The Migration Museum explores how the movement of people to and from the UK has made us who we are — as individuals, as communities, and as nations.
Over the past decade, our award-winning team have worked with a wide range of partners and collaborators to co-create interactive, story-led exhibitions and events from a series of temporary venues, while our learning programme reaches thousands of students each year via facilitated workshops, and many more via teacher training and partnerships.
We now have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a permanent Migration Museum in the heart of the City of London, opening in 2028, powered by a network of pop-ups and partners across the UK.
Material Crimes is what happens when “true crime” meets academic research.
Like a detective, each episode’s narrator follows the trail of a different infrastructural crime, grounded in a specific site, with its own particular history. But whether the focus is a dam, a trainline or a mine, in the suburbs of South Africa or a military base in Kenya, the people featured across these episodes tie them to global histories of conquest, resource extraction, and profit-making.
Find out more about the project: https://materialcrimes.com/About
Backyard Biennial has been generously supported by:
Aldgate Connect BID
