5 - Dislodged from History, Confronted by Walls : Picturing Migration as a Global Emergency

Summary

Abstract

This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. It argues that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes the elimination of national borders and the nation state itself a revolutionary necessity.

Keywords: asylum, free movement, border walls, art exhibitions, national sovereignty, migrants and refugees

André Aciman (2016) writes of the Holocaust survivors who became homeless refugees, “You are eternally dislodged, eternally transitional, and eternally out of sync with the world.” This describes the condition of enduring trauma that persists for contemporary refugees, too, including survivors of gang violence, war, persecution, famine, and other life-threatening conditions. This does not mean, however, that refugees cannot return to living productive lives, if they are lucky enough to have the opportunity to do so, even if they may have a continuing sense of themselves as displaced or in mourning. How much worse is the condition of refugees and migrants made by their status as stateless subjects without rights, reviled by the countries where they seek refuge?

In this essay, I focus on a selection of photographs, videos, and artworks shown in the United States and international art exhibitions that demonstrate in powerful ways the traumatic effects of anti-immigration policy on migrants and refugees. Such works and exhibitions create a public sphere that makes visible the dire plight of refugees and the unstoppable flow of migratory movement. I also examine American asylum politics, explore the question of borders and free movement, and consider the ethics and efficacy of border walls to help explain the origins and impact of immigration policy and to show how the global capitalist system of militarized borders has become increasingly untenable.

Among the exhibitions on forced migration that have opened in art museums in the United States in the past several years is The Warmth of Other Suns – Stories of Global Displacement at the Phillips Collection in Philadelphia (2019). The exhibition featured about 75 paintings, photographs, videos, and installations that explored the global refugee crisis with works chosen by curators from the New Museum in New York City.