We are delighted to welcome Liz Hingley as MMB Honorary Artist 2024-25. Liz Hingley is an artist and anthropologist with a participatory practice shaped by her experiences living across Europe and China. Rooted in the visual arts, her work focuses on tools and rituals of relation that transcend political boundaries and connect the local and global.
MMB is particularly excited about The SIM Project, which Liz has been working on since 2017. Liz led an MMB tour of the V&A, London 2024 Design Festival exhibition and wrote a post on the MMB blog about the 2025 Waymarkers exhibition on the Strand.
The SIM Project
‘People migrate from one place to another, and as they move, their bonds of love with the place they come from continue like spider webs.’
Mahide Uz, Turkish poet and workshop participant
The SIM Project draws on the smartphone SIM card as an international symbol of connection – one that unlocks local and global networks to bring people with different experiences of mobility together. Combining analogue and digital photographic processes, the project gives material meaning to the ways people curate personal digital archives, and how they visualise and map their everyday lives using the common cameraphone.
The SIM Project uses a sensory workshop methodology that has been co-designed over eight years (Hingley, 2022). Participants draw lines with wool to places they connect to on a borderless world map and then select one image to print from their smartphone that gives them a sense of belonging. Using a bespoke 3D printed camera and the chemical ‘magic’ of a miniature darkroom, participants optically transfer the image from their phone screen onto a SIM-scale glass piece. Gathered around a table, the group learns how to polish a metal frame and hand stamp a backplate with a meaningful number, to mirror the International Identification Number on the back of every SIM card. Each person makes one to keep and wear as a pendant, and they are invited to add another to the mobile collection.
The touring exhibition features artworks made in eight countries – from Cyprus to Finland to the USA and the UK – by people with roots in more than 40 countries.
