MIGRANTS IN A BOAT, 2025

Catalogue Note

From Performance to Print

Migrants in a Boat transforms one of Banksy's most memorable recent interventions into a collectible object. The image depicts a small inflatable craft crowded with figures wearing brilliant orange lifejackets, apparently being carried above a dense sea of raised hands.

The origin of the composition lies at Glastonbury Festival in 2024, when an inflatable migrant boat containing dummy passengers in lifejackets was launched above the audience during the performance by IDLES. Carried from hand to hand by thousands of festivalgoers, the boat behaved exactly like a conventional crowd-surfer—but replaced the euphoric body of a concertgoer with the visual language of the contemporary migration crisis. The 2025 screenprint translates that fleeting performance into a permanent image.

That transformation is important. In the original intervention, the crowd was the artwork's mechanism. Without thousands of hands supporting it, the boat could not move. In the print, Banksy preserves precisely that relationship: the vessel occupies the upper half of the composition while an almost abstract mass of hands rises beneath it.

Who Is Carrying Whom?

The image operates through a characteristically simple reversal. Images of overcrowded migrant boats normally show people isolated at sea, surrounded by water and uncertainty. Here there is no sea at all. Instead, there are people.

The countless hands beneath the vessel become a human ocean, physically holding its passengers above them. The visual metaphor is difficult to miss: rather than allowing the boat to disappear into the water, society has the capacity to support those inside it.

The orange lifejackets are crucial. Against the predominantly black-and-cream composition, they become the immediate focus of the image. They identify vulnerability before we can identify individual faces. Banksy does not provide biographies for the passengers; they appear huddled together, anonymous and dependent upon the collective action taking place beneath them.

Glastonbury as the Gallery

The method of distribution is also very Banksy. Rather than being launched through the conventional signed-print market, the screenprint appeared at Glastonbury in 2025. Contemporary reports describe copies being released in small batches, with a one-per-customer restriction, before selling out by the end of the festival.

That context places Migrants in a Boat somewhere between artwork, poster, political ephemera and festival souvenir. Its edition size remains unknown, and examples are unsigned. Roseberys has subsequently catalogued the work alongside eight other Glastonbury posters carrying migration-related messages, including Migrating Is Not Illegal, I See No Borders, Nothing to Declare and Migration Is Beautiful.

For Banksy, this ambiguity is hardly unusual. Some of the most interesting objects surrounding his practice were originally created to circulate rather than to become precious: protest placards, posters, stickers, newspapers and inexpensive merchandise. Their later transformation into collectibles creates exactly the sort of contradiction his work has always enjoyed.

Migrants in a Boat is particularly effective because it preserves the central idea of the 2024 performance without needing to reproduce the spectacle itself. A boat that existed for a few minutes above a festival audience becomes an image of collective responsibility.

The crowd is no longer simply watching the artwork. The crowd is holding it up.

And that may be the most important element of the composition. Banksy does not show us migrants disappearing over the horizon. He places them directly above thousands of open hands. The boat stays afloat because everybody underneath it refuses to let it fall.