Art and migration: revisioning the borders of community

Abstract

"Art and migration is a collective response to the idea that migration is disruptive of national heritage. Featuring chapters by academics and interviews with art professionals, the book explores 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 it as a paradigm of artistic creation. The trajectories of transnational artworks and artists' careers are reflected in the density and dynamism of fairs and biennales, itinerant museum exhibitions, and shifting art centres. Dominant political and cultural narratives frame globalisation as a recent development that reverses centuries of cultural homogeneity, but art historians and migration scholars are reimagining these narratives to create an histoire croisée that challenges the power of constructed borders and cultural gatekeeping. Analysing the vested political interests of migration terminology, such as the erroneous conflation of 'refugees' and 'asylum seekers' and the politically constructed use of 'diaspora', this volume reappraises the historic formation of national identities and aesthetics heritage as constructed under transnational visual influences. It argues that centring migration - often silenced by normative archives or by nationalist attribution practices - is part of the workload of revisioning art history and decolonising museums."--Back cover

Contents

Revisioning art and migration / Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz -- Part I: Art, migration, and borders. Empathy, migration, and art : an interview with Dieter Roelstraete ; Silenced migrants : an interview with David Antonio Cruz ; Memorable mobilities : an interview with Axel Karlsson Rixon ; Ambiguous attachments : creations of diasporic aesthetics and migratory imagery in Chinese Australian art / Birgit Mersmann ; Retracing colonial choreographies in contemporary Native American art / Christopher T. Green ; Race, migration, and visual culture : the activist challenging the ever-present colonial imagination / Claudia Tazreiter ; Precarious temporalities : gender, migration, and refugee arts / Rachel A. Lewis -- Part II: Migrants' paths in the arts. Global and translocal : an interview with Marina Galvani ; Portrait of the artist as migrant : an interview with Robyn Asleson ; Stories of Global Displacement : an interview with Massimiliano Gioni ; A publication of one's own : identity and community among migrant Latin American artists in New York c. 1970 / Aime Iglesias Lukin ; 'Nobody's darlings'? Edith May Fry and Australian expatriate art in the 1920s / Victoria Souliman ; Agostina Segatori and the immigrant Italian models of Paris / Susan Waller ; Gardens, migrations, and memories : aesthetic and intercultural learning and the (re)construction of identity / David Bell -- Part III: Mapping the researcher's identity. Photographing migrants and positionality : an interview with Leslie Urena ; Reflections on positionality / Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz.