Interview with Chris Taylor, curator of Shifting Borders: A Journey to the Centre of Our World(s)1

Abstract

Shifting Borders exhibits ‘traces’ of human mobility across millennia: of exploratory journeys, forced migrations, exilic arrivals at foreign lands and artistic schematizations of them based on memory and experience. The traces assume the form of maps, passports, photographs of people and locations, as well as actual diaries of movement produced by those who move or by institutions who regulate their movements. Crafted as a form of pilgrimage to these stories, the exhibition transcends binary understandings of hospitality as an inviolable norm and/or a secular pact conforming with the commercial rules of catering for strangers. Instead, the presentation of items in clusters produces variations of story-telling as a tribute to the presence of human otherness. Featuring styles of inscription and creative staging of particular mobility events, Shifting Borders showcases forms of movement vis-à-vis (‘psychic centres’): homes and homelands, memories of uprooting but also the excitement of travel and exploration in and of unknown territories. The exhibition’s simulation of such movements transforms artistic pilgrimage to a method of awakening conscience in regard to offering hospitality to others. The exhibition is hosted in the Parkinson Building, one of the heritage buildings of the University of Leeds, as part of the Brotherton Collections, curated by the University’s Libraries. Its rhizomatic story-telling of imaginaries of movement and homemaking reflects the overlapping biographies of its physical location: Leeds as a multicultural city with diverse migrant, exiled and diasporic communities, but also one of the foremost creative cities in the United Kingdom, and the University of Leeds as a pedagogical hub that hosts very diverse student populations from around the world.