This seminar will explore how contemporary art has changed since the twentieth century’s end. In particular, we will focus on how the massive migrations of recent years have shaped artistic expressions and projects. Not only has the theme of migration increasingly emerged as a dominant subject of art, but the varied mobilities of the contemporary world have radically reshaped art’s practices of production, display, and reception. We will study the increasing universality of the conditions of global migration and interdependence and examine this current reality’s relationships to art and curatorial practice. The seminar will inhabit, rethink, and depart from existing perspectives in transnational or diaspora studies to develop empirical and theoretical directions beyond some of the current frameworks, which appear to have stiffened from overuse. In the broadest sense, the seminar will explore the relationship of the visual arts to the forms of subjectivity produced by migration and displacement in recent years. How have experiences of migration and mobility found expression in artistic, curatorial, and critical practices? How do we grasp the new cultural assemblage generated by the conditions of relentless human mobility in the present? What kinds of artists and curators does migration make? How does transnational mobility, and moving from one location to another, hinder or further an artist’s or curator’s career? To what extent have artists and curators become migrant workers in contemporary art’s international labor market?
Alexander Alberro