Mining the museum in an age of migration

Chapter 4 explores how Western museums of art and culture have become important arenas for new forms of bridge-building as well as critical interrogations of the Eurocentric bias inherent in these institutions. It focuses on artists’ interventions in which the artist takes on the role as an interlocutor within the discourse of museum collections. This strategy has been used for more than two decades and gives evidence that one of the most efficient means of institutional critique and of deconstructing Western museums as cultural spaces is to invite a critical artist to make an intervention. Some artists have coupled interventionist strategies with decolonial and postcolonial critique. American artist Fred Wilson’s groundbreaking installation ‘Mining the Museum’ (1992) effectively disclosed the underlying syntax of coloniality and the hegemonic relations of power that shape museums, culturally, socially and economically. Chapter 4 proposes that such institutional interventions are a means to turn museums into sites of contamination capable of including formerly repressed histories and migrating memories. To substantiate this proposition, the chapter turns to Yinka Shonibare’s exhibition Garden of Love at the Quai Branly Museum (Paris, 2007) and Rina Banerjee’s exhibition Chimeras of India and the West at the Musée Guimet (Paris, 2011).

Conclusion

The Conclusion briefly sums up the findings of the preceding chapters and points towards the future relevance of studies in contemporary art and migration. In continuation of the last chapter, it emphasises art’s ability to address difficult political and humanitarian issues related to the current refugee situation in Europe and the Middle East, which will undoubtedly continue to preoccupy the minds of people in these regions and elsewhere for many years to come.

The politics of identity and recognition in the ‘global art world’

Questions of cultural identity and the status of non-Western artists in the West have been important to the discourses on the interrelations between contemporary art, migration and globalisation for at least two decades. Chapter 2 considers the connections between the critical discourse on cultural identity, the globalisation of the art world and the adoption of multicultural policies by Western art institutions. It critically engages with the British discourse on ‘New Internationalism’ in the 1990s as well as the wider and more recent discourse on ‘global art’. It is argued that discussions from the last twenty-five years have not only made it clear that institutional multiculturalism is not the answer to the challenge of attaining genuine recognition of non-Western artists in the West, but also revealed that the critical discourse on identity politics has not been able to come up with solutions, either. In fact, it is marred by the same binary thinking and mechanisms of exclusion that it aims to deconstruct. Chapter 2 concludes with two suggestions to how we can get beyond the deadlock of the critical discourse on identity politics.

Introduction

The introduction presents the book’s ambition to explore how contemporary art and culture have been, and continue to be, transformed by intensified migration. It takes as its starting point the premise that in an increasingly globalised world, mobility and cultural contacts are both common aspects of everyday life and complicating factors with respect to national, regional, cultural and communal identities. However, such mobility and connectivity also give impetus to processes of globalisation, which this study treats as inextricably linked to migration. Starting with a consideration of contemporary migration and globalisation, and drawing on Jacques Rancière’s and Chantal Mouffe’s theories of the connection between art and politics, the Introduction moves on to the book’s three key concerns – identity and belonging, visibility and recognition, aesthetics and politics. They are introduced and explained by way of an analysis of three works by Danh Vo, Thukral & Tagra and Emily Jacir. Then follows a short literature review and an account of how this book sits within the field described as ‘studies in contemporary art and migration’. After an overview of the book’s chapters, the Introduction accounts for the book’s overall approach.

Identification, disidentification and the imaginative reconfiguration of identity

Chapter 5 seeks to contribute to the development of more dynamic and complex understandings of ‘identity’ by turning to Stuart Hall’s, Amelia Jones’s and José Esteban Muñoz’s theories of identity as identification. Chapter 5 puts an intersectional approach to the test by examining works by three artists whose works can be read as artistic ‘answers’ to the same challenge as Jones, Muñoz and Hall have sought to meet: that of developing a dynamic notion of identity beyond classic identity politics grounded in Western binary thinking. Examining works by London-based Nigerian expatriate Yinka Shonibare, Delhi-based British expatriate Bharti Kher, and Mexico City-based Vietnamese Danh Vo, who grew up in Denmark, the chapter explores art’s potential to chart how identifications and disidentifications can shift dynamically as one navigates across cultures. The analyses focus on the artists’ insistence on circulation, movement and cultural contamination as the ‘ground’ of their works, and seek to substantiate the hypothesis that their works articulate a vision of the subject as a subject that comes into being through processes of translation and transculturation, which eventually constitute its hybrid identity.

The artist as migrant worker

Chapter 3 addresses an issue directly related to the institutional transformation of the art world explored in Chapter 2, namely how globalisation and migration have also changed the role and work of artists by providing many artists with new conditions of possibility for developing cross-cultural artistic practices. The chapter unpacks the issue of artists on the move today and seeks to answer the questions that the title implies: Have artists in demand on the global exhibition circuit become a kind of migrant workers in the international labour market of the global art world? If so, what kind of migrants are they? And what kind of artists? The careers and positions of selected artists from India – Bharti Kher, Rina Banerjee, Ravinder Reddy and Anish Kapoor – are used as examples to substantiate the chapter’s proposition that internationally renowned artists have in fact become a kind of migrant workers. Moreover, this change of conditions delivers a further blow to the myth of the artist as a detached creator, because it invites a more profound exploration of how the artist’s role has been reconfigured as that of a translator, mediator and bridge-builder between people and cultures.

Globalisation-from-above and globalisation-from-below

Chapter 1 outlines how ‘globalisation’ and ‘migration’ have been articulated in Western discussions of contemporary art since the 1990s, and how the discourse on art and globalisation intersects with the discourse on art and migration. Migration is at the same time one of the causes and vehicles of globalisation, and one of its effects. Migration can thus be seen as an aspect of globalisation, also in terms of conceptualisation. The discourse analysis of this chapter is structured by Stuart Hall’s distinction between two vectors in the globalisation processes: globalisation-from-above and globalisation-from-below. Following Hall, I contend that the discourse on art and globalisation primarily revolves around issues concerning globalisation-from-above, whereas the discourse on art and migration mainly revolves around problematics related to globalisation-from-below. The critical discourse analysis in Chapter 1 complements the literature review’s mapping of the field and considers texts by key researches such as Hans Belting, Peter Weibel, James Elkins, Mieke Bal, Griselda Pollock, and from Third Text.

Migrant geographies and European politics of irregular migration

Through close-readings of two video installations, Chapter 6 addresses the problematics of the increasing securitisation of nation-state borders in ‘Fortress Europe’ and beyond, which restricts the movements of people who are forced to migrate by war, destitution, persecution or environmental reasons. Ursula Biemann’s video-essay Sahara Chronicle (2006-7) is used to unpack the general question of how artistic productions can respond to discourses on complex political issues such as forced migration, European border policies, and the risk of reducing migrants to ‘bare life’ (Agamben) in the politico-juridical order. Isaac Julien’s video installation Western Union: Small Boats (2007) is used to examine how the enforcement of European borders against irregular migration surfaces in the artistic-cinematic imaginary. Chapter 6 explores the tensional interpenetration of politics, ethics and aesthetics in Julien’s installation. Using a concept coined by Mieke Bal, it proposes that Isaac Julien’s installation could be conceived of as an instance of ‘migratory aesthetics’. However, the sheer beauty of his cinematic representation of the real-life tragedies of migrants makes it necessary to move beyond the question of aesthetics and consider the issue of aestheticisation and the ethical relation of the artist to his subject matter.