Saturday 18 July 2026, 2pm–3.30pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX
Free – click here to book via Whitechapel Gallery website

Ahead of the men’s World Cup final, the Migration Museum will be hosting artist Nicole Chui to lead a participatory workshop exploring football, migration, race, and belonging as part of Backyard Biennial: East at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Drawing on her practice engaging football culture, fashion, ESEA identity, and protest, Chui will guide participants in stitching onto your favourite football shirts – weaving in personal journeys of migration. Whilst stitching, we will hold an open conversation about national identity, and what it means to feel at home – on and off the pitch. Participants will be able to take their shirts home and wear them with pride!

What to expect:
During this workshop, we will use the tactile, intuitive art of hand embroidery to express inner emotions, exploring how clothing carries our stories of movement, identity, and home. Whether it’s a nod to your roots, a favourite team, or your own journey, you’ll learn how to transform your own football shirt into a wearable archive of what home and community mean to you through the art of hand embroidery. The embroidery threads will be your map on the shirt.

This will be a fast-paced session where we have different types of stitches available for beginner* to intermediate** level embroiderers.   

Please note: participants will need to bring their own football shirts to add their embroidery to during the workshop, and are encouraged to bring in visual references of identity – photographs, symbolism, sketches – that you want to coney onto the shirt. Nicole will provide Tapestry Needles, thread snips, embroidery thread, and embroidery hoops, pens and paper (for sketching ideas) for all attendees.

* Beginner = don’t know how to thread needles, tie knots, and not confident in hand sewing
** Intermediate = can hand sew confidently and learn basic stitches from backstitch to chainstitch

Booking instructions:
This workshop will last 90 minutes and is limited to 15 participants max, so that Nicole has time to engage properly with all participants.

Click here to book (opens in Whitechapel Gallery website)

About Nicole Chui:

Nicole Chui is a London-based embroidery artist whose work is messy, brash, and disruptive. Her work is about exploring identity through intuition and emotion. Chui visualises the expressive feelings, inner thoughts, and stories behind the surface through every stitch. She is currently exploring her identity in football, movement and sports through her embroidery art practice. Her client list include adidas, i-D, schuh, Nike, Manchester United, Victoria Beckham, and the Young V&A. 

Football and dance in particular have always been core in her life ever since she was a child, from training as a ballet dancer for 10 years, to co-founding the London based football club Baes FC; a grassroots football community for women, trans, and non-binary people of Asian heritage to play football. After graduating from London College of Fashion with a degree in BA (Hons) Creative Direction for Fashion, Chui was selected as one of the ‘25 future faces 25 and under’ by the Evening Standard in 2019. In 2025, Chui was an artist-in-residence at Tottenham Hotspur’s OOF gallery, where she debuted her solo show ‘Ruined’.

Photo: Elliot Baxter @elliotbphotography

Migration Museum at Backyard Biennal: East

We are excited to be part of Backyard Biennial: East, a free, summer arts festival initiated by Whitechapel Gallery in collaboration with more than 40 local partners across East London. We are running three activities during the festival: a participatory embroidery workshop exploring football, migration, race, and belonging led by Nicole Chui; a migration walking tour of the East End; and inviting visitors to share migration stories with us.

Find out more here