Contemporary Art’s Thanatic Work

Abstract

Contemporary art has insistently turned to the experience of migration with a view to making us see, and possibly to making us indirectly experience and reflect on the embodied politics of migration. The documentary mode has featured prominently in art’s attempt at accounting for the reality of global migration. Other strategies have privileged a combination of allegory and empiricist experientiality, artists thus aiming at triggering an embodied thought experiment and pondering the brutal and tragic truth of migration. In order to analyze such thought experiments and the experiential contract they elaborate, the essay first turns to exhibitions that have explored the complex aesthetic experience entailed in a collective reflection on mass migration: Persona Grata, the 2019 show jointly imagined by MAC VAL and the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, and When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration Through Contemporary Art, a show that toured, between 2019 and 2021, from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. Building on the analysis of some of the works featuring in these two shows (works by Ben, Kader Attia, or Mona Hatoum), the essay then focuses on the works of Adel Abdessemed (Hope, 2011) and Enrique Ramírez (Les Incertains, 2012–2020), two artists who imagine spectatorial experience as the locus of a political self-reflexive confrontation with the “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe) of global migration or forced exile. In the shows and works here explored, visual experimentation harnesses the sensorial to a rehistoricizing of the gaze. Art thus becomes the contested site of an embodied unhinging of spectatorship endowed with a renewed, if paradoxical, sense of collective political accountability.