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ABSTRACT
Inasmuch as the events of 2010 and 2011 ushered in tremendous shifts in political consciousness across the Mashreq and Maghreb, they too increased the mass movements and migrations of humanity. That Maghrebi spheres of cultural production have sought to document and problematise these seismic transformations is undeniable. While narratives of hardship, stagnation, and political struggles undergird most analyses of the post-revolutionary Maghreb and discourses of migration, this essay seeks instead to demonstrate how the visual strategies of contemporary artists render the traumas of dislocation – both real and metaphysical – and in turn, engender a politics and aesthetics of placelessness. This essay probes into the placeless nature of not only the artists' liminal operations but also explores the conceptual methods through which the tensions of migrancy are manifest. Yet, the question remains: How does the trope of the border inform the creative expressions of not only entrapment, but endless mobility? In what ways do these artists adopt visual praxes that are politically engaged? How do fraught and layered transnational narratives of migration speak to the complexities of placelessness and displacement? How are the figure and position of the migrant visually treated in their works? Commanding a transregional and liminal visuality, and guided by the works of artists such as Bouchra Khalili, Yto Barrada, Kader Attia, Driss Ouadahi, Mohamed Ben Slama, Zineb Sedira, and Moufida Fedhila, among others, this essay theorises the political junctures and paradoxes of place/placelessness, and the transnational networks of empathy and solidarity in which these artists' works are inscribed.
Acknowledgements
Without the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the impeccable organisation and intellectual generosity of Joseph Krause and Nabil Boudraa in their Summer Institute, ‘Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia: Literature, the Arts, and Cinema since Independence', this project would have been otherwise impossible. I am indebted to the speakers who came and imparted their immense seas of knowledge: James Le Sueur, Réda Bensmaïa, Jane Goodman, Eric Sellin, Mary Vogl, and Cynthia Becker. My tremendous gratitude is also due to the many truly invested, engaged colleagues who participated in the institute as well, sparking rich discussions and debates throughout. But most of all, I dedicate this piece to the thousands, who daily risk their lives, seeking their place in this world.
Notes
1. Barrada (Citation2005). See also San Francisco Museum of Modern Art interview, ‘Yto Barrada on the Ways the Strait of Gibraltar Shapes Life in Tangier.' See http://bcove.me/cqwr19lu and http://bcove.me/y7rqf2lb
2. See discussion offered by Bouchra Khalili at the 10th Sharjah Biennial, sponsored by the Sharjah Art Foundation. https://vimeo.com/17756648
3. Schoene (Citation2012)
… it is inspired by a cinematic process based on the interrelation between on-screen and off-screen spaces, which allows both a metonymic and deictic visual approach, suggesting a reflection on the ability of human experiences and clandestine existences to generate an alternative geography – a geography of resistance. I was interested in confronting the most normative drawing that exists – a map – with most singular situations and experiences. But in this work, the peculiar aspects of word, speech and language become an imaginary dimension of the image, because through the narrative and the way it is told, the viewer is led to mentally reconstruct the whole journey, revealing a form of fictional dimension of the project, even though all the trajectories are absolutely real.
4. Harraga, stemming from the Arabic verb ‘to burn', refers to those individuals who burn their identity papers. Professor Reda Bensmaia's remarks from the July 1, 2014 meeting of the NEH Summer Institute pushed us participants to problematize the positions and institutional representations of the harraga. See also Pandolfo (Citation2007). Fernandez (Citation1999).
5. This was challenged succinctly in the exhibition, Here and Elsewhere, held at the New Museum in 2014. Natalie Bell and Massimiliano Gioni ask: ‘Can art history ever completely let go of artists’ origins or cultural affinities?’
6. See (2012, 61–62). Mohamed Ben Soltane's cartoon, stained with coffee, illustrates the external, market-driven pressures on artists of Muslim backgrounds to reproduce derogatory stereotypes. This is typified in the gallerist's suggestion to the artist, ‘But … why don't you work on subjects more specific to your CULTURE?!!! Like battered women, for example … .’ Born in Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia, and trained at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, Ben Soltane's The Artist and the Emigrant (2010) demonstrates the phenomenon of artists being typecast and pigeonholed by the art market. For further discussion on this problem in art markets, see Mercer (Citation1994).
7. Attia, http://kaderattia.de/rochers-carres-2/
8. ‘The documentation of injustice – or the discursively segregated other – can often present an aesthetically overdetermined subject who in consequence becomes not only decontextualized but symptomatic of both suffering and otherness. The aesthetic impulse can often usurp the documentative imperative’.