Right Bank, Bilal Hamdad, 2021
Credit © EPPPD, collection of the National Museum of the History of Immigration

Each Life is a Story revisits twenty years of acquisitions from the museum’s collection and its three main holdings—history, testimonies and society, and contemporary art—to offer a new narrative through the lens of invisibility, which is, in many ways, linked to immigration.

Making visible a reality shaped by invisibility is the primary mission of the National Museum of the History of Immigration: to “change perceptions,” to make the history of immigration in France known and recognized, and to contribute to the acknowledgment of those who have also helped build France. How can we give bodies and faces to the anonymous, those relegated to the margins, tolerated in invisibility, yet contested when they become visible? How can we put into perspective and highlight the collective history and individual journeys?

These are some of the key questions at the heart of the Museum’s collections, which are revisited in this new exhibition. Two hundred artworks, archival documents, photographs, videos, paintings, objects, and migration stories from the three holdings enter into dialogue to unearth this part of our history and to transmit the memory and voices of the witnesses of these contemporary odysseys.