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Art and migration: revisioning the borders of community is a collective response to current and historic constructs of migration as disruptive of national heritage. This interplay of academic essays and art professionals’ interviews investigates how the visual arts – especially by or about migrants – create points of encounter between individuals, places, and objects. Migration has increasingly taken centre stage in contemporary art, as artists claim migration as a paradigm of artistic creation. The myriad trajectories of transnational artworks and artists’ careers outlined in the volume are reflected in the density and dynamism of fairs and biennales, itinerant museum exhibitions and shifting art centres. It analyses the vested political interests of migration terminology such as the synonymous use of ‘refugees’ and ‘asylum seekers’ or the politically constructed use of ‘diaspora’. Political and cultural narratives frame globalisation as a recent shift that reverses centuries of cultural homogeneity. Art historians and migration scholars are engaged in revisioning these narratives, with terms and methodologies shared by both fields. Both disciplines are elaborating an histoire croisée of the circulation of art that denounces the structural power of constructed borders and cultural gatekeeping, and this volume reappraises the historic formation of national identities and aesthetics heritage as constructed under transnational visual influences. This resonates with migrant artists’ own demands for self-determination in a display space that too often favours canonicity over hybridity. Centring migration – often silenced by normative archives or by nationalist attribution practices – is part of the workload of revisioning art history and decolonising museums.
Globalisation-from-above and globalisation-from-below The relationship between globalisation and migration is complex, in terms of both history and theory; so also are the interrelations between the discourses on globalisation and migration and the artistic phenomena that the Introduction subsumed under the categories of global art and migratory aesthetics. This chapter seeks to draw up an outline of how ‘globalisation’ and ‘migration’ have been articulated in Western discussions of contemporary art since the 1990s, and how the two discourses intersect. The
Mining the museum in an age of migration Migratory aesthetics and artists with a migrant background can have various points of entry into museums, galleries and collections. The genre of artists’ interventions is one of the most important in this regard because of its critical, transformative and bridge-building potential. After a brief introduction to the practice, this chapter examines interventions by three artists, Fred Wilson, Yinka Shonibare and Rina Banerjee, who all take a critical de- and postcolonial approach to the institutional structures and spaces
existing systems of knowledge, and how artists can exploit aesthetic and affective means to transform existing images of the world into a subversive politics of images. Migratory aesthetics in Isaac Julien’s Western Union: Small Boats As a result of the burgeoning migratory movements to, from and within Europe, the borders of its nation-states have been increasingly fortified across 195 196 Migration into art the continent. Irregular migrants and refugees from the war zones and destitute areas of the world are trying to gain entry to what they imagine to be a
), 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
a diversity of aesthetic responses that cannot be contained within the boundaries of genre such as Clark’s ‘landscape’. In a discussion of what the distinguishing features of black British art in the 1980s might be, Kobena Mercer has suggested that ‘British blackness’ should be placed in ‘the bigger picture of diaspora aesthetics in twentieth century art as a whole’.41 This formulation not only invokes the breadth of ‘diaspora aesthetics’, or ‘migratory aesthetics’;42 it also makes it clear that the category of genre cannot encompass it. As the overarching topic
and panic that people generally experience in the face of natural disasters” (Arcimaviciene and Baglama, 2018 : 9). Metaphors are determined in part by a language, its culture, and its literature. Both Anche Superman era un rifugiato and Rondini e ronde forcefully portray the aesthetic position that Sam Durrant and Catherine M. Lord argue for in their introduction to Essays in Migratory Aesthetics : “Rather than being a representation of the world, art is an act of world making that alters, however subtly, the fabric of cultures in which we
2 The politics of identity and recognition in the ‘global art world’ Identity politics informed by postcolonial critique dominated the discourses on the interrelations of globalisation, migration and contemporary art in the 1990s and the early 2000s. The previous chapter characterised the position from which the struggle for recognition of non-Western artists was launched, designating it the postcolonial position, in contradistinction to the migratory aesthetics position that gathered momentum in the 2000s. This second chapter examines the historical role and