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Abstract
Contemporary art has insistently turned to the experience of migration with a view to making us see, and possibly to making us indirectly experience and reflect on the embodied politics of migration. The documentary mode has featured prominently in art’s attempt at accounting for the reality of global migration. Other strategies have privileged a combination of allegory and empiricist experientiality, artists thus aiming at triggering an embodied thought experiment and pondering the brutal and tragic truth of migration. In order to analyze such thought experiments and the experiential contract they elaborate, the essay first turns to exhibitions that have explored the complex aesthetic experience entailed in a collective reflection on mass migration: Persona Grata, the 2019 show jointly imagined by MAC VAL and the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, and When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration Through Contemporary Art, a show that toured, between 2019 and 2021, from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. Building on the analysis of some of the works featuring in these two shows (works by Ben, Kader Attia, or Mona Hatoum), the essay then focuses on the works of Adel Abdessemed (Hope, 2011) and Enrique Ramírez (Les Incertains, 2012–2020), two artists who imagine spectatorial experience as the locus of a political self-reflexive confrontation with the “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe) of global migration or forced exile. In the shows and works here explored, visual experimentation harnesses the sensorial to a rehistoricizing of the gaze. Art thus becomes the contested site of an embodied unhinging of spectatorship endowed with a renewed, if paradoxical, sense of collective political accountability.
Acknowledgements
Figures 1, 3, 4, and 5 have been reproduced with permission of the copyright holders. Further reproduction, distribution or transmission is prohibited, except as otherwise permitted by law. Due diligence has been conducted in attempting to request permission from the copyright holder of figure 2 (Mona Hatoum, Exodus II). The illustration has been reproduced under the “Fair Dealing” provision.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 One should also mention the volume edited by Marina Gržinić, Aneta Stojnić, and Miško Šuvaković, Regimes of Invisibility in Contemporary Art, Theory and Culture (2017), as well as the research carried out in the journal InVisible Culture, that aims at theorizing the making of visual opacity (see issue 22 [2015] devoted to opacity and issue 26 [2017] on “Border Crossings”).
2 Among Forensic Architecture’s investigations, see I.62: “Pushbacks across the Evros/Meriç river: situated testimony,” which investigates the pushbacks of migrants at the border between Greece and Turkey that have been taking place since 2016 (https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/evros-situated-testimony), or investigation I.52: “Shipwreck at the threshold of Europe, Lesvos, Aegean Sea,” which occurred in October 2015 (https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/shipwreck-at-the-threshold-of-europe).
3 Forensic Oceanography has self-initiated five investigations to date. See https://forensic-architecture.org/category/forensic-oceanography.
4 At this point of his essay, he is quoting from Irit Rogoff’s “Art/Theory/Elsewhere,” “Dossier on Documenta 11,” Texte zur Kunst (August 2002).
5 Marianne Mourning for the Denial of Peoples’ Rights (1989, plaster, fabric, bones, wood). http://www.macval.fr/Ben.
6 Invisible ink, UV light, presence detectors. https://www.macval.fr/Julien-Discrit.
7 Butler is referring to Arendt’s theorizing of the right to appear in chapter 5 of The Human Condition, in which she insists that the space of appearance even precedes the constitution of public space (Arendt 2018, 199). See also the last section of Butler’s dialogue with Athena Athanasiou in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013).
9 Although he writes about anthropology at large, Edward Said explores similar ambiguities nesting in the narrativization of the other, in his essay “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors” (1989, 211, 212, 213–214).
10 Mbembe is of course reworking Michel Foucault’s words in Society Must be Defended, when analyzing “the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century,” and the introduction of a new right: “It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die. The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live” (Foucault 2003, 241).
11 Demos is here quoting Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity” (2010, 704).
12 Interestingly, Anna-Leena Toivanen also resorts to the metaphor of the zombie in her article dealing with the death-in-life reality of migrants who have reached their countries of destination, yet find themselves deprived of any stable sense of belonging, a condition Toivanen reads as characteristic of contemporary “zombified mobilities” (Toivanen Citation2018).
13 My thanks go to Judith Misrahi-Barak and Ami Barak for introducing me to Ramírez’s work.
14 Interestingly, the Prix Marcel Duchamp for that year was awarded to Paris-based Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga whose installation Flowers for Africa (2013–), submitted for the prize, consists in the reproductions of flower arrangements that had featured on the tables of diplomatic summits leading to the independence of African countries. The slowly dying arrangements also produced an uncanny and ghostly memorialization of colonialism and of its protracted end. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/videos/video/kapwani-kiwanga-prix-marcel-duchamp-2020.
15 Pelluchon focuses specifically on the environmental crisis and the necessity to rethink subjectivity in an intimate relation with other living beings, but her call to an “ethics of consideration” echoes the thanatic ethics explored in the present volume.
16 Pezzani and Heller are here quoting Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame” (2004).