The Migrants by Jean David Nkot

Cameroonian artist, Jean David Nkot, tells the untold stories of low-income migrant workers, most of who are only able to secure manual labour as they struggle to make ends meet in a new, strange and often unwelcoming city.

His works depict these individuals working - from construction works to home cleaners, armed with the tools of their trade, and sometimes looking tired and weary from it. As a background, he paints a colorful backdrop of border lines, sometimes cutting across even the workers’ own bodies, almost as if they are being drawn apart between their home countries and their new abodes.

Nkot has shared that he gets inspiration from his childhood and how he experienced moving between homes a lot. He understands that migrants are faced with many burdens - starting over, loosing time, loosing careers, low income from hard work that nobody else wants to do, clashing cultures, and many others. He wants people to be aware of these and to start talking about them so that in doing so, solutions might be found.

See some of his works below.