Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Theories, Sites and Research Methods

Stories exploring how migration shapes art and aesthetic practices and vice versa.

Dedicated to the stories of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and exiles, this collection asks how these stories are interwoven with art, art practices, activism, reception, and (re-)presentation. It explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration, flight, and other forms of enforced dislocation and border/border crossings in global contexts--the latter significant phenomena of social transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

These entanglements take center stage when migration shapes art and aesthetic practices (and vice versa), when actors employ image politics and visualization strategies in and about migration at different times and places, or when materialities, sites, and spaces gain importance for decision-making processes.

Giving space to these stories of art and migration and its power of pluriverse knowledge production, the book takes an art and cultural studies perspective, questions the significance of spatial changes for artistic practice in migration, and elaborates on new or different theory formation. Bringing together its case studies and theoretical approaches, the argumentation unfolds over the five sections of the book: Visibilities; Invisibilities, Sites; Spaces, Materiality; Materialisation, Racism; Resistance and Practices; and Performativity.

Cathrine Bublatzky is a visual and media anthropologist. She is a senior lecturer and researcher in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Tübingen University in Germany. Burcu Dogramaci is professor of twentieth-century and contemporary art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Kerstin Pinther is professor of African art history and curator of modern and contemporary art in a global context at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Mona Schieren is professor of transcultural art histories at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen, Germany.