Migratory Aesthetics: Art and Politics beyond Identity

Abstract

This essay examines how “migratory aesthetics” expresses key dynamics in contemporary postcolonial culture and offers an alternative to identity politics. It demonstrates how migratory aesthetics is embodied in key international art exhibitions, from Kassel Documenta to the Contemporary Commonwealth show in Melbourne. Within the terms of identity politics, exhibitions function to represent specific groups, and also to constitute spaces in which disenfranchised or new “hybrid” identities might flourish. But the exhibiting of identity does not, in and of itself, enfranchise or facilitate participation. The institutional model of multiculturalism that simply promotes the representation of diverse identities as add-ons to mainstream culture is a static one, which does not address the issue of interaction; hence, “migrant” cultures may be acknowledged on their own terms, without any change to the “mainstream.” Migratory aesthetics, like other mobilisations of aesthetics that focus on connectivity and relationality, may be understood as a response to the limitations of identity politics in both institutional and aesthetic terms. An attempt to shift “identities” out of a static space into a dynamic set of relationships, it promotes new ways of understanding intercultural and transnational histories as well as new ways of imagining the future.