The Concurrency of Migration and Transculturalism in Moving Image (original) (raw)
, in conjunction with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), announces a call for papers for an interdisciplinary, transnational conference on contemporary im/migrant literature and innovative aesthetics. Many important texts of the 21st century reflect complex processes of memory, migration, and identity formation from the margins of migrant communities globally. Exciting opportunities exist to integrate im/migrant literature from an interdisciplinary, transnational approach. This conference asks: what narratives are shaping our understanding of the dynamics and identities involved in and around im/migration processes and, more importantly, what forms do these narratives take? Through face-to-face interaction and hands-on work, this conference showcases how innovative literature is not simply abstract expressions of remote concepts, but is directly informed by and informing the material realities that shape human existence. Words have power. While data driven social science research can inform important public policy debates and affect policy outcomes, such conversations and policy decisions should also consider the cultural values and criticisms expressed in literature and the arts more generally. This conference argues that thoughtful cultural and literary study can help to give voice to the voiceless and can create opportunities to unite, through readership and through a wider circulation of texts, communities which might not otherwise come into contact with each other. This conference's emphasis on form argues (drawing on scholars such as Jameson, Nussbaum, Sontag, Spivak) that it is also because of form that the arts matter. It is the very materiality of texts and formal qualities of certain stories that impact readers and shape public knowledge. To read about migration and its effects not only through news media or online sources, but also through innovative storytelling creates opportunities for greater empathy, or at least understanding, with diverse audiences of readers. How literature's formal attributes can bring us, as readers, into powerful experiences that we do not yet know how to name has been theorized variously by many scholars in recent times—as " empathy " by Nussbaum or " affect " by Jameson, for example. Yet by calling attention to what is not yet incorporated into the status quo, such a relationship between a text and its
Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art: Cinema Beyond Europe (Routledge, 2016)
Mobility and Migration in Film and Moving Image Art explores cinematic and artistic representations of migration and mobility in Europe from the 1990s to today. Drawing on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving-image art, and mobility studies, Bayraktar provides historically situated close readings of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks and infrastructures across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Probing the notion of Europe as a coherent entity and a borderless space, this interdisciplinary study investigates the ways in which European ideals of mobility and fluidity are deeply enmeshed with forced migration, illegalization, and xenophobia. With a specific focus on distinct forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, tourism, and refugee mobilities, Bayraktar studies the new counter-hegemonic imaginations invoked by the work of filmmakers such as Ayşe Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Kutluğ Ataman, Ursula Biemann, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo. Challenging aesthetic as well as national, cultural, and political boundaries, the works central to this book envision Europe as a diverse, inclusive, and unfixed continent that is reimagined from many elsewheres well beyond its borders.
PhiN Beiheft 18/2020 "(T)Räume der Migration", 2020
This article deals with the multifaceted and increasingly visible topic of migration in contemporary graphic literature. Selective readings of post-2000 works by Francophone and Anglophone authors (e.g. Jean-Philippe Stassen, Joe Sacco, Shaun Tan, Zabus & Hippolyte, Yvan Alagbé, and Bill) will give a critical insight into the artistic scope, the testimonial truthfulness, and the political significance of these graphic productions. Several main narrative modes and aesthetic strategies in these works – such as realist convention and testimony, stylisation and allegory, or experimental storytelling and satire – will be discussed. Further analysis will cover two major narrative and chronotopical elements: the dreamed spaces opened up by migration (in the sense of 'imagined hostlands'); and the complex loci of the contact and (hoped for) transit zones. Examining the recurrent scenographical properties of these fictions, their sensitive effects, and their identitarian and political implications will show potentials and capacities, but also possible shortcomings and pitfalls of representing migrant subjectivities through this mode of creative expression.
The DFG network "Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents" invites contributions for its upcoming publication, dedicated to the interwoven histories of migration, art and globalisation as a significant phenomenon of social and political transformation in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. From a decisively art and cultural studies-centred perspective, the book explores the complex entanglements of art and aesthetic practices with migration, flight and other forms of enforced disloca tion and border/border crossings. We are interested in scholarly as well as artistic proposals that tackle the meaning of global migration for both art-making and theory production. It is our aim to contribute to the interdisciplinary field of research on the migratory turn in the arts with a publication that is shaped by multiple and diverse forms of knowledge production. The book envisages to give voice to current debates on racism and decolonisation, as well as epistemologies of the Sou th. Against this backdrop and in close relation to theoretical approaches and case studies, the argumentative thrust of the book unfolds over five key concepts and sections: 1) Resistance/Racism, 2) Visibilities/Invisibilities, 3) Sites/Spaces, 4) Materialization/Manifestation and 5) Practices/Performativity. These five sections are connected by way of a common line of inquiry ("cross-cutting topics") which considers agency and self-empowerment, gender and queerness, the importance of new digital and social media, and the role of religion. "Entangled Histories of Art and Migration" aims at sustainably anchoring research on migration within the field of global art history by introducing fresh categories and methodologies.
Session 13 Migration and Transculturalidad(e): Agents of Transcultural Art and Art History
MOTION: MIGRATIONS -- Proceedings of the 35th World Congress of Art History, 2023
As concepts, migration and transculturality share a common origin in the permanent transgression of national and cultural boundaries, together with the instability of the latter, and both take into account the phenomena of cultural contact as well as the processes of cultural negotiation. Migration implies the global movement of people. Along with this movement of people, images and aesthetic concepts, things and everyday practices are also part of such migration processes. In this respect, migration in particular sets in motion processes of transculturation. Phenomena of cultural as well as artistic adoption and 'blending' (mestizaje, creolisation, métissage, hybridity, migration) are treated globally and constitute a specific field of research. The contributions to the session "Migration and Transculturalidad(e): Agents of Transcultural Art and Art History', negotiate the multi-layered forms of transcultural entanglements and migratory processes in different ways and with different emphases. In the context of theorising transculturality, we have shown how closely interwoven it is with the wanderings of people, concepts, aesthetics and artworks themselves. Such concepts of transculturalidad(e), a term that is itself hybrid, accordingly assume a permanent transgression of national and cultural borders, with their inherent instability, and focus on phenomena of cultural contact and 'mixing' as well as cultural negotiation processes. The chapter thus aspires to elaborate entangled art histories concerning historical as well as geographical aspects, and socio-political or aesthetical issues.
2011
This dissertation investigates the historical and contemporary tensions around mobility and identity in Europe since WWII, with particular emphasis on their contemporary configurations. Drawing on recent theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, moving image art, and mobility studies, I provide close and historically situated readings of films, videos, and installations within a larger historical and geographical scope of European migration that encompasses the Middle East and Africa. The films and videos I study establish a non-Western countergeography of Europe that has produced multiple "others" in its constant efforts to recompose its borders and identity. They address psychological and sociological processes of integration and cultural syncretism as well as discrimination and racism against minorities and migrants. Although the geopolitical focus of my dissertation is Europe, the works I analyze challenge territorially bounded conceptions of identity and culture. They extend representation to socially disenfranchised groups such as undocumented migrants by narrating multiple, and often times perilous, forms of travel and border-crossing from migrants' perspective. With attention not only to the shifting political and geographic borders of Europe but also to the shifting institutional and aesthetic borders of cinema, these works likewise invoke a powerful cinematiccountergeography that investigates the changing terrains of cinema and contemporary art. The first chapter, on The Edge of Heaven (2007) by Fatih Akın and Countess Sophia Hatun (1997) by Ayşe Polat, focuses on second-generation Turkish German labor migrants and analyzes the cinematic production of heterogeneous diasporic spaces and subjects that transcend binaries of host-home or migrant-citizen. My second chapter, on Hidden (2005) by Michael Haneke and Exiles (2004) by Tony Gatlif, discusses the second-generation North African migrants in France and the violent history of French colonization of Algeria in relation to contemporary (postcolonial) French society. The third chapter, on the site-specific video installation Küba (2004) by Kutluğ Ataman, focuses on the counter-stereotypical representation of migration in relation to the multichannel installation format as well as traditional forms of political cinema. The fourth and fifth chapters, on the video essay Sudeuropa (2005-7) by Raphaël Cuomo and Maria Iorio and the video installation Sahara Chronicle (2006-9) by Ursula Biemann, respectively, examine the relationship between "illegal" migration and the creation of new borderlands in Southern Europe and North, West, and sub-Saharan Africa.
Understanding Displacement in Visual Art and Cultural History: 1945 to Now
Over the Ocean: Scenes of Displacement, Migration, and the Search for a New Humanism in Contemporary Cinema’, 2023
Dr Denis Grünemeier, Trier University ‘Over the Ocean: Scenes of Displacement, Migration, and the Search for a New Humanism in Contemporary Cinema’ (R) My presentation aims to explore the potential of cinema in dealing with migration and the refugee crisis, which have become the central social tasks of the 21st century. The experiences of migration and loss, accelerated by climate change, (civil) wars, and resource scarcity, dramatically contradict our fundamental need for social and personal anchorage. Consequently, there are numerous artistic representations that respond to the present events. Within both the media and art, classical art-historical images are reinterpreted against the backdrop of contemporary catastrophes. A striking example is Théodore Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa of 1819, serving as both an allegory for the failure of human civilization in the refugee crisis and a reference point for contemporary artists. In exchange with other arts and media, cinema emerges as a vital form of resistance, capable of addressing the complex issues of borders, cultural amalgamation, and migration. From a religiously grounded contemplation, as in The Ten Commandments (1956), to the apparent crisis of humanism in Human Flow (2017), feature films and (experimental) documentaries unfold their critical visual potential. Here, at the latest, the enormous sociopolitical concern of many films is palpable. In my presentation, I will highlight the power of cinema as a tool for exploring displacement, focusing on a selection of powerful images and scenes, as well as Theo Angelopoulos' unfinished film project The Other Sea (2012).
International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2024
In the last decades, the growing use of participatory methodologies and creative methods in migration research has opened innovative ways to collect, analyze, and disseminate data. These approaches encourage experimental, interdisciplinary, and collaborative work through artistic methods to study human mobility and expand the community of inquiry and interpretation, often intervening in contexts of social injustice and exclusion. This article is intended as a reflection on the potentialities and limits of the use of arts-based methods in migration research. The contribution opens with a review of how participatory visual methods have been framed in the field of migration studies. The second part explores an example of a collaborative study that adopted photovoice and sensory mapping to reflect on the concept of "welcoming spaces". Finally, it analyses arts-based methods as a potential space for social change, focusing on three main dimensions: collective learning, relational aesthetics, and knowledge co-construction.
Travelling Narratives and Images in Times of Migration : Introduction
2019
Migrant narratives and aesthetic practices influenced by experiences of exile and migration constitute a growing field in contemporary art and literature. Current trends in migration and globalisation have led to an increase in travelling narratives, images and objects, and the production of aesthetic practices describing and problematising exile and migration, working in and through tradition. Migratory patterns and issues related to the protection of refugees and asylum seekers contribute to the strong societal impact of migrant aesthetics and narratives, but they also serve to explain the need for them as such, and the need to reexamine them. More than ever, we need to understand the experiences of exiles, migrants and refugees. The objective of this special issue is therefore to examine textual, material and visual expressions that represent, discuss and problematise migration.