Claims on Home: Museums and Art’s History Unbound
This session investigates artistic and historiographic practices that make claims on home, an urgent and long-standing issue with disciplinary and international consequence. Movements to repatriate looted objects and claims to return exiled peoples sometimes suppose an integral, historical, and even natural bond to home. Indeed, home would seem to be on the side of possession, permanence, and immutability, and opposed to the dispossessed and the transient. Has it always been and must it be the case? While there are clear art historical stakes in finding origins or acknowledging intended audiences, what are the ethical stakes in starting histories of art with a clear sense of a given, preset home? The session brings together pressing cases from the contemporary Middle East to challenge art historical reliance on the notion of "home," both conceptually and institutionally.
Field of Study:
Africa
Middle East
Oceania/Australia
Indigenous peoples
Visual Culture
