Art, refugeedom and the aesthetic encounter

ABSTRACT

Refugeedom and its various politicisations, as a complex human experience of political alterity, poses unique challenges for the visual aesthetics of refugee subjecthoods and subjectivities. In contrast to media and humanitarian visualities, aesthetic engagement with what is contentiously referred to as ‘refugee art’ might have the potential to create more complex possibilities and open new subjective spaces by enabling a different epistemic access to the experiences of refugeedom's constituted subjects. We turn to Jacques Rancière's theoretical frame as we focus attention on the aesthetic encounter, or the affective and sensory experience of what an artwork does. Looking closely at six artworks focused on the recent Syrian ‘refugee crisis’, we ask: What might we perceive differently of forced displacement in the aesthetic encounter that we might not otherwise see in activist or politicised spaces, or in everyday visual representations of forced displacement? Whether by reinscribing real-world subject positions or transcending them, the aesthetic experience can open up a rift – even if momentary – in ordinary ways of seeing and perceiving refugeedom. In other words, the aesthetic experience expands our moral imagination by staging occasions for creating scenes of relationality with political alterity that do not exist or that have not been previously imagined.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugeedom
• political alterity
• refugee art
• Rancière
• aesthetic encounter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The poem continues:

over waves like rings of a tree rings of the centuries rocking and spilling on the windy sea

as if water kept its shape after the jug has broken one shining petrified moment before the shattered pieces fall away

2 We thank an anonymous reviewer for this contribution.

3 Upon a visit to Sicily, King Roger convinced Al-Idrissi to stay: ‘you are from a family of heirs [to the throne]. Every time you are among Muslims their kings have tried to kill you, every time you have been with me you have been safe’ (السعدي 2010, 433, 438 – own translation). Idrisi stayed for 15 years and wrote his most famous book featuring these maps: The Rambles of He Who Misses Breaking Through Horizons (own translation).

4 ضاع في الغربة عمري ليت شعري أين قبري