The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA) and the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design within the “George Enescu” National University of Arts from Iași organized, on November 14 & 15, 2024, the international conference Nowhere at Home: Art and Migration in Times of Global Catastrophe.

Migration has been at the forefront of contemporary art, occupying a central place in its theory, history and criticism for more than three decades. In a way, it is consubstantial with the very idea of contemporaneity as a global, post-colonial condition, in which the circulation of ideas, people and objects have often been highlighted. Migratory routes, diasporic cultures, displacement and disruption, hybrid identities, creolization and cultural translation, as well as the cosmopolitan imaginary have become mainstream topics of art exhibitions, art historical treaties and curatorial discourses over the past decades. Nevertheless, an abrupt shift of perspective has taken place in European and US politics lately, where new, exclusionary forms of nationalism and populism are threatening the fabric of democracy as a global worldview predicated on diversity, tolerance and multicultural inclusion. It situates the migrant ontologically at a loss in the world, stigmatized by non-belonging. Therefore, the migrant appears as a double displaced being, ousted “temporally no less than spatially” (Ranajit Guha). While the precarious social condition of migrants, as well as the damnation and zombification of the migrant (especially in the form of war refugees), have also been present in mainstream curatorial discourses over the years, they have been certainly less explored in art historical scholarship.

The present conference aimed to explore the representation and critical analysis of migration in contemporary art in the changing conditions of the present day global political turmoil, with competing ideologies clashing in popular media and violent conflicts erupting in many parts of the world, while the climate catastrophe is looming. The cry that “There is no Planet B” seems not to have been heard, and the notion of “home” has become increasingly difficult to define and defend, let alone to reimagine. How can visual arts contribute to the visualization of exclusion and at the same time how can they counter the stigmatizing effects of such representational practices? What forms and techniques of artistic production are more suitable for engaging politically with such topics? What role can contemporary art play in a cultural environment characterized by disjunction and opposition, as well as in our turbulent and increasingly violent social lives?

Speakers of the conference were:

• Iro Katsaridou • Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece • Taking A Stance: Refugee Crisis in Greece and Museum Policies

• Viviana Usubiaga • Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina • Gimme Shelter. Contemporary Artistic Practices in the World Mirage

• Diana Angoso De Guzmán • Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain • Nomadic Sensibility: Migration, Materiality, and the Politics of Shelter in the Works of Merz and Kato

• Izabela Kowalczyk • University of Arts, Poznan, Poland • Birds as Migrants and as a Metaphor of Human Migrants

• Daria Brasca & Tamara Zumbühl • Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy & Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – HSLU, Switzerland • Unpacking the Discourse: Migration Representation in Contemporary Art in Switzerland

• Veronica Kamei • School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India • Contestations and Collaborations: The Aar Paar Project and the Re-Imagined Abstraction of Migratory Aesthetics

• Klara Kemp-Welch • Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK • “The Romanians are Coming”: Labour Migration and the Politics of the Observational Documentary

• Cristian Nae • The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art, “George Enescu” National University of Arts from Iași, Romania • The Witness and the Archive: Cartographies of Migration in Contemporary Art

• Raha Khademi • Kaarnamaa Institute of Art & Visual Culture, Tehran, Iran • Memory and Identity in Exile: A Review of First Post-Exile Works of Sonia Balassanian

• Laura Bravo • University of Puerto Rico • Hurricanes and Other Colonial Disasters: Migration Processes in Puerto Rican Art in the 21st Century

• Ejjebli Sanae • University Mohamed I, Oujda, Maroc • Echoes of Exile: The Artistic Quest for Truth Amidst Global Turmoil

• Ornela Barisone • Centro de Investigaciones en Arte y Patrimonio, Buenos Aires, Argentina • Art and Translanguage to Bridge Understanding about Immigration: A Collaborate International Online Learning (COIL) Experience

• Anna Sejbæk Torp-Pedersen • KU Leuven, Belgium • Cartography and Migration

• Gheorghe Cecan • “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University from Iași, Romania • Giorgio Agamben and the Singularity between Ontology and Politics: The Impossibility of Bare-life and the Exceptionality of the Ordinary

• Mirela Ștefănescu • The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art, “George Enescu” National University of Arts from Iași, Romania • Review on the Exhibition Limbo Schengen, CIAC Baia Turcească Iași