Understanding Displacement Aesthetics: History, Art and Museums

(Hardback)

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Description

Since the Second World War and the formalisation of the international refugee regime, forced displacement has been marked by a set of aesthetic, practical, and institutional concerns. Understanding Displacement Aesthetics examines how visual culture and art practice constructs and challenges ideas about forced displacement and refugees. The novel framework for 'displacement aesthetics' moves beyond conventional understandings of aesthetics as merely representational, demonstrating the entanglement of visual culture, art practices, and forced displacement in postmigrant contexts. Bringing together the fields of cultural history, art history, and curatorial studies, Understanding Displacement Aesthetics identifies four areas for consideration: visual tropes of refugeedom; language and identity; institutional and artistic responses to displacement; and lived experiences of artists with backgrounds of displacement. Through archival research, visual culture and art, interviews, and collaborative curatorship, Understanding Displacement Aesthetics offers new insight into overcoming the limitations that contexts of displacement can present for artists, art galleries and institutions addressing refugeedom and its legacies.

Reviews

This groundbreaking volume critically engages with debates on art and displacement, while also advancing vital reflections on ethical practices in museums working with artists of refugee backgrounds offering rich insights for scholars and students in the intersecting fields of cultural history, art history, and curatorial studies.
Professor Anne Ring Petersen, University of Copenhagen

Author Bio

Professor Ana Carden-Coyne is Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester
Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne