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), resulting in the development of a particular ‘migratory aesthetics’ (Durrant and Lord, 2007 ) and the emergence of the ‘migrant image’ in contemporary art practice, serving as a critical, even resistant visual operator in times of global crisis (Demos, 2013a ). These transformations make it necessary to study art in relation to ‘The Migrant’s Time’ and rethink art history from the perspective of transnational migration and diaspora studies (Mathur, 2011 ). To explore the production of diasporic Chineseness in the art creation of Chinese Australian migrant artists, I
insists, is a positive development. At intervals he has returned to his native Italy – born in Melbourne, he confronted his parents’ experience when he travelled to where they had come from. Different from the colonial avatars and the Australian migrant artists of my generation, his view of my story renders it curiously nebulous – as if the ‘toxic relationship’, to adapt Marcia Langton's phrase for the non-relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, which locks the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ country in a mutual basilisk stare could be shattered simply by
the very real and transformative forces of globalisation and migration, discussions about identity politics in the art world have fundamentally transformed the dominant Western conception of the ‘international art world’ as an exclusive club for Westerners only. Such discussions paved the way for an institutional multiculturalism that has changed the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion of non-Western and migrant artists in the art institutional system of the West. To illustrate this transformation, I will use a telling survey by Lotte Philipsen of the number of
) – are now rearing their ugly heads again. The shared experiences of injustices and the dislocation of self – for migrants, migrant artists, and artists dealing with the subject of migration – are met with a thirst for cultural exchange, and these constantly redraw the borders of their communities. These experiences, partaken in or mediated through art, reclaim identities from reification, assert the need for embodied action in a shared space, and defeat expectations of ‘tidy definitions of otherness’ (Antoni and Hatoum, 1998 : 54). This volume would not be complete
what Mishra calls a ‘scene of situational laterality’. In this ‘situational laterality’, the emphasis falls on how the migrant’s identity and subjectivity are linked to an active and situation-specific becoming or hybridisation, and how this process forms part of a strategic positioning that is constitutive of identity.31 Of these two fundamentally different notions of transnational attachments – dual territory and situational laterality, it is the latter that seems to provide us with the better basis for understanding the socio-cultural conditions of migrant artists
outlook on the world. But the neglect of the aesthetic dimensions in postcolonial identity politics and the dissociation from Western traditions often leaves unanswered the crucial question of how migrant artists contribute not only to changing institutional structures but also to renewing artistic and cultural expressions. The challenge for all those who wish to use the concept of migratory aesthetics as a catalyst for an analysis of cultural change related to migration, and to the kinds of mobile individuals that these changes both create and are created by, consists
, he also knows that this is compromised by these associations. Editors: More generally, what is your answer as a curator to these labels? What place do you think should be given to terms like ‘foreign artists’, ‘settled artists’, ‘migrant artists’ or ‘expatriate’, ‘exiled’, and similar terms? What do you do with the hyphenated labels that spring up whenever you curate migrant art, or art that has migrated? Dieter Roelstraete: Artists are quintessentially migratory paradigms anyway. The vast majority of artists are people who were born in one place and travelled
-Manuel Miranda in the guise of Alexander Hamilton. Editors: What is the place given to foreign artists, settled artists, and migrant artists in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery? How does the National Portrait Gallery mark borders and nationalities on its museum labels? Are there any markers of migration? Leslie Ureña: We include the birthplace of the sitter. Robert Capa, born Budapest, Hungary, for example. We do not specify nationality, however. Some artists do not want to be categorised, or have changed nationalities mid-career, or use one nationality in one
transformable selfidentifications. If the latter is stressed, intersectionality can be used to conceptualise individual agency. As Ann Phoenix has pointed out, intersectionality is incompatible with essentialist identity politics. It ‘fits better with a notion of strategic alliances, where people make temporary alliances for particular purposes’.10 It is thus well suited for exploring how identifications and disidentifications can shift as migrant artists (and migrants in general) cross national borders, reorient themselves in new contexts and develop other attachments. The
Coercion in Swedish Immigration Detention’, European Journal of Criminology Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1477370818820627 (Accessed 7 August 2019). Canning, V., Caur, J., Gilley, A., Kebemba, E., Rafique, A. and Verson, J. (2017). Migrant Artists Mutual Aid: Strategies for Survival, Recipes for Resistance. London: Calverts Co-operative. Carr, M. (2012). Fortress Europe: Inside the War Against Immigration. London: Hurst and Co. Clante Bendixen, M. (2018). How Many are Coming, and From Where? Refugees Welcome Denmark. Available at: http