The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013) (original) (raw)

The Migrant Image: The Art and the Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis investigates how contemporary artists have creatively and critically imaged a newly global world of shifting borders, states of exception, mobile populations, and increasing economic and political inequality. Focusing on artists in America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, such as Steve McQueen, Emily Jacir, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl, the book assembles a series of case studies that focuses on the innovative remodeling of the documentary mode in present practices in a present moment. There, the conventional oppositions between truth and fiction cease to function, yet artists are no less intent on exploring the conditions of social, political and economic reality. The book, written in an accessible and lucid style, takes up the conflicts of global culture by looking foremost at the figure of the migrant in contemporary art. By doing so, it draws out migration’s multivalent meanings, aesthetic conditions, and biopolitical implications in regards to theories of globalization, based on the conviction that globalization is not a transparent reality, but rather a conflictual set of cultural, political, and economic narratives. Building on the insights of research architecture, cultural geography, and political theory, as well as on the art history of the modern avant-garde movements and their relation to geopolitical dislocation (which was the focus of my most recent book, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, MIT Press, 2007), the present volume aims to deepen our understanding of the image regimes in which the politics of migration and the experimental aesthetics of cultural practices are compellingly intertwined.