"Foreigners Everywhere!": Art and Refugee Identification

Adriano Pedrosa’s 2024 iteration of the Venice Biennale, entitled Foreigners Everywhere!, engages, as he writes, the “multifarious crises concerning the movement and existence of people across countries, nations, territories and borders.” Centering displacement and refugeeism, the Biennale, amongst other recent exhibitions, focalizes a series of provocations around what it means to create and curate “refugee art.” By emphasizing refugee identification as an ongoing process by both the State as well as individuals and communities, art opens up questions about how that categorization is performed and how it evolves in response to historical and political forces. Art, in other words, helps us to think about the lifeworlds of refugees, and, in turn, the lifeworlds of refugees invites us to (re)consider the art world’s operations and expectations.

This panel welcomes papers that propose new ways of conceptualizing the artistic, geopolitical, and transnational implications of refugee art in light of recent scholarship in critical refugee studies. How do artists compel viewers to think differently about the category of refugee? How is the contemporary art world representing, supporting, and/or circulating refugeeism? Who is the audience for such work? How are ideas of citizenship, belonging, and the nation-state complicated or reaffirmed? We are particularly interested in proposals that engage theories of migration and diaspora; the current geopolitical and climatological conditions driving mass migrations; or theories of the nation, statehood, and citizenship. We welcome projects that invite us to consider new paradigms for understanding the ways refugee art is produced and instrumentalized now.