Kim Sheung who participated in the Flavours without borders project. Photograph by Andrew Grainger.

Hastings Museum & Art Gallery wins prestigious Museum Association award

Hastings Museum & Art Gallery has won Best Small Museum Project Award for its partnership project with the Refugee Buddy Project, ‘Illuminating invisible histories: Flavours without borders’. Erica Smith gives three cheers for an excellent collaboration.

Something exciting is happening at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery – I’ve noticed it over the last year or so, but it’s hard to put my finger on what exactly has changed. Rather than being a dusty old building on the edge of town, it feels like the Museum is becoming a place where interesting things happen and people want to visit.

Mussadiq shares his story. Photograph by Andrew Grainger.

Flavours without borders is a good example of this. The collaboration between the museum and the Refugee Buddy Project aimed to raise awareness of refugee experiences in Hastings and St Leonards, increase co-collaboration, and co-produce programming with community organisations to broaden the museum’s offering and draw in new audiences.

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Three dinner parties took place at the museum, where participants brought homemade food and personal objects. Through food and facilitated conversation, an intergenerational and multinational community shared their untold stories of their culture and life in Hastings. Their insights were captured on film for viewing during Refugee Week this Summer.

One of the four judges, the Science Museum’s Fiona Slater said, “We absolutely loved this inspiring project – it brought people together to tell their stories of migration over shared food. They documented stories in a film and donated personal objects that were then displayed in the Museum to highlight, as they so beautifully put it, that we have more in common than divides us.”

Alice Roberts-Pratt, Museum & Collections Manager, Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, said: “We’re immensely proud to have won this prestigious award, it really reflects the hard work the team have put in to ensure Hastings Museum & Art Gallery is a welcoming place for everyone.

“Our work with the Refugee Buddy Project is incredibly valuable and we are so grateful to Rossana Leal, her team, and the participants for sharing their personal stories with us and being so open to collaboration.”

Rossana Leal said, “The cooking was a really important element of the project. We invited three cooks to prepare a dinner which described and represented their cultural backgrounds… we had Lily Kim’s Korean menu, Helen Dodaki’s Kurdish food and Roa Al Madi’s Palestinian menu. The food was out of this world and at each dinner people told their stories of migration and displacement.

Since becoming an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, the Museum has co-produced events, exhibitions and experiences with a range of project partners including We Out Here, Playing The Race Card, The Refugee Buddy Project, Hastings Queer History Collective and In-Sight, a D/deaf, Disabled, and neurodivergent group.

I think this support from the Arts Council has given the museum the boost that it needed to re-frame what it does, why it does it and who it is doing it for. It is delightful to see how this new culture is changing and growing.

Flavours without borders will continue to develop through 2024/25 with two placements by members of the community, working with museum staff on reinterpreting the gallery’s permanent display about life in Hastings. You can find out more about what is happening at the museum on its website. You can find out more about the Refugee Buddy Project here.

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