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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
work of Harry Kernoff, a migrant artist working in Dublin from the early 1920s onwards. Although working in the same period as Yeats, Kernoff’s artistic technique and choice of subject matter contrasts with his older peer, offering a different view of everyday life in twentieth-century Dublin. The chapter will consider Kernoff’s leftist politics in relation to his depiction of Dublin’s docks, labourers, and sites or figures associated with the left in Ireland, such as Liberty Hall and James Connolly. Moving into the later 1930s, the focus will shift from the
intermixing processes and heterogeneity of the cultural phenomenon in question, and bringing our attention to its local as well as its cosmopolitan affiliations. The first set of issues invariably leads to the second, which revolves around visibility and recognition. Here, I am concerned with the potential of art to highlight migration-related issues and ‘represent’ particular groups 11 12 Migration into art of migrants, but also with the visibility and recognition of migrant artists. What impact do increased mobility and migration have on the art world and the careers