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

Forced displacement and its politicisations pose unique challenges for the visual aesthetics of refugeedom. Media and humanitarian visualities often capture flight and bareness, disorientation and deprivation, and the emotional and material losses of fearful migration. Yet in trying to bridge moral and phenomenological distances to the sufferings of others, these can too often flatten, dehistoricise and reduce to ‘the merely human’, not least through a ‘politics of pity’ and suffering (Boltanski 1999; Chouliaraki 2010; Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015; Malkki 1996, 390; Musarò 2017; Rajaram 2002). More: they can reinscribe unequal power relationships and transform the moral act of bearing witness into a hierarchical and politicised relationship of sufferer, witness and spectator; the privileged viewer is very literally ‘viewing’ the deserving but distant sufferer, who is now reduced to traumatised subject (Perugini and Zucconi 2017; Szörényi 2006). Within these registers, the invisible operation of certain ‘frames of representability’ (Butler 2007, 953, 954) means that we as spectators become witnesses to attempts at making the refugee's otherness somehow qualify as human, or, indeed, as ‘us’. And all this with the consequence that their affective impact is signalled through what Malkki (1996, 388, 390) argues are the two key visual tropes of the refugee: the ‘anonymous corporeality’ of multitudes of ‘mere’ human beings – ‘the merely human’ – and the intimacy of the solitary individual, standing metonymically for an essentialised refugeeness and objectified in a particular state of being.

And yet artworks about, by or for refugees are often argued to have the potential to do something both more aesthetically complex and more politically disruptive (Binder and Jaworsky 2018; Dogramaci and Mersmann 2019; Evans 2021). Art makes available a certain kind of knowledge of our others, even a moral knowledge, and so it opens possibilities for creating new and perhaps as yet unimagined subjective spaces. Beyond speaking of another's reality and aestheticizing it, artworks about refugeedom might also enable aesthetic encounters that put us in the non-objectifying presence of a particular human experience. It is partly for this reason that, beyond styles, iconographies, oeuvres and genres of cultural production, art historian Griselda Pollock calls us to attend to the ways in which artworks might work on us in these normatively deeper registers. In attending to ‘the urgencies of human living and dying’, she writes, artworks become both ‘carriers of alterity’ – or the ‘otherness we seek in order to know ourselves better’ – and the aesthetic tracings of the artist moving towards and away from trauma, loss and exile (Pollock 2013; 2014, 10–11, 13–14).

This potential of the artwork and the aesthetic encounter to work on us are worth exploring around what is sometimes contentiously referred to as ‘refugee art’, or artworks that speak from within or on behalf of the forcibly displaced (Kurasawa 2015). Rotas (2004), for instance, argues that artists who happen to be refugees are considered neither ‘white enough’ nor ‘black enough’ to be able to function simply as ‘artists’; Parzer (2021) explores how, through a variety of strategies, artists who are also refugees reconcile artistic practice with their social categorisation as refugee and Syrian; and Eckmann (2019) explicitly connects the ways in which aesthetic modernism and exile share the dispositions of crisis and displacement which characterise modernity – with refugee alienation and its subjectivities being a central theme of aesthetic modernism. Brilliantly situating these complexities is Zucconi’s (2018) work on the controversial (non)transfer of Caravaggio's The Seven Works of Mercy from Naples’ Pio Monte della Misericordia to the Italian president's residence in tribute to the migrants crossing the Mediterranean. He excavates the controversies involved in

allying the religious theme of mercy with the mostly secular field of contemporary humanitarianism; … [and] the risk of … of upstaging the real sufferings of individuals affected by catastrophic events by giving centre stage to a work of art. (Zucconi 2018, 4)

More generally, in calling for a migratory turn, Dogramaci and Mersmann (2019, 9) argue that art history ‘has not yet systematically investigated migration as a category and mover of artistic production against the discursive backdrop of transnationalization and globalization’. Indeed, in two special issues of this journal (in 2008 and 2006), scholars have grappled with the necessity of ‘integrating the thematics of migration into the critical practices of art historical research’ (Saloni Mathur 2011, xi–xii). These often involve issues of representation and voice and entangle artistic and refugee subjectivities with justified concerns over appropriation.

With these contestations in mind, our analysis is situated adjacent to the post-Bourdieusian sociology of art's recent interest in an artwork's social meaning (Acord and DeNora 2008; Born 2010; Heinich, Schaeffer, and Talon-Hugon 2014; Inglis and Hughson 2005) and art history's anti-intentionalist mode of analysis, based on close-in seeing and a dense description of the ‘messy mechanics of specific pictures’ (Herbert 2015, 3). The sociology of arts struggles to centre the artworks as autonomous objects of inquiry because it continues to anchor them as reductive expressions of social processes (Zolberg 1990; 2005); it has difficulty moving beyond production perspectives and legacies of Howard Becker and Pierre Bourdieu (McCormick 2022); and as Heinich’s (2022) wider project of attending to meaning and value in a sociology of art shows, it struggles to undertake a sociological analysis of artworks. To this end, we do not position the artworks as ‘relics’ whose significance comes from their authorship or market history. Instead, we turn to Jacques Rancière's (2013a; 2016) theoretical frame as we detach the artworks from these traditional sociology of art concerns and focus our attention on the aesthetic encounter, or the affective and sensory experience of what ‘refugee art’, as meaningful creative object, might make available to us; on what the artwork about refugees does.

To place an empirical boundary on our analysis, we focus attention on specific artworks, in a particular moment, and angled on a particular migration event. A now sizeable body of formal art – objects, installations, murals, paintings, performances, films, documentaries – forms a rich artistic and aesthetic landscape of the Syrian displacement and its diffractions across the wider Mediterranean. We look closely at six such artworks. We first attend, through close in-looking and interpretation, to the artworks’ materialities, their formal aesthetic properties and the artistic strategies and practices they contain. We then work to understand the sociological work they do as representation, the values they index, and the moral, emotional and affective landscapes they narrate. If refugeedom as complex human experience of political alterity poses unique challenges for artistic or aesthetic representation, aesthetic engagement might nevertheless enable a different epistemic access to the experiences of the forcibly displaced. What might we see or perceive differently of forced displacement in the aesthetic encounter that we might not otherwise see in activist or politicised spaces, or indeed in the everyday visual representations of forced displacement?

Refugeedom and the aesthetic encounter

Our point of departure is a framing theorisation of the experience of being forcibly displaced. We have argued elsewhere that to be a refugee is to live a common human experience – one among many – which in the modern age is characterised by structurally situated political alterity and constraint (Riga et al., 2020a). At least since the nineteenth century, this conceptualisation of what we have theorised as ‘refugeedom’ means that being a refugee is shaped by distinctive experiences that can both produce and enable the constitution of an entanglement of subjectivities (Riga et al., 2020a). More specifically, we formally conceptualised this by positioning refugeedom as producing an architectural triad of distinctive subjects and subjectivations, whereby refugees are produced and constituted as various kinds of ‘refugee subjects’. The first of these is the rights-bearing, juridical or human rights subject, formally recognised by international law, yet in reality caught and subjugated within and across border regime practices. It is a subjecthood and modern subjectivity that is defined by the categories and practices of refugee humanitarianism, with a traceable historical lineage in Western modernity's ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2012; see also Galli 2020). Second, the refugee can be constituted as a vulnerable and resilient subject, the victim of loss and trauma and often social-psychologised in need of protections and care. Constituted by the bureaucratic practices and visualities of crisis humanitarianism, the refugee becomes a dependent beneficiary of aid and generally depoliticised. And third, the refugee moves through her everyday life too often as a politicised, racialised or othered subject in a country that is not her own (Riga et al., 2020a; 2020b; see also Karyotis, Mulvey, and Skleparis 2021). This is the refugee as political alter, formed through the everyday racialisations and exclusions of living in politicised spaces with the social weight of the assignation ‘refugee’. Taking these together, we might therefore see refugeedom's produced and constituted subjectivities as bearing a greater phenomenological resonance with those of the postcolonial than with those theorised as inhering to ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998). For both, agency and subjectivity are shaped by differentials of power and by the structural realities of political alterity.

We embed this theorisation of refugeedom and its artistic instantiations within an expansive Rancièrian (2013a; 2013b; 2016) understanding of the potentialities of the autonomy of aesthetic experience. Moving beyond the sociologies of production, mediation and reception, which treat ‘audiences’ through Bourdieusian frames of consumption, and so through social categories such as gender, class and race, we instead position the artworks as autonomous objects that can contain sensory experiences which anyone can access (Rancière 2016, 176). This effectively allows for an intrinsically egalitarian access to meaning. In contradistinction to Bourdieu’s (1984) assertion of the relationship between taste and social location, Rancière's oeuvre is predicated on the Kantian notion of the universality of the judgment of taste (Rancière 2016, 171–176). Anyone can experience a work of art. This axiomatic equality of intellect, of anyone and everyone, means that in beholding art as ‘an autonomous form of life’ which can exchange properties with life (Rancière 2016, 118), the viewer or beholder ‘who experiences the free play of the aesthetic in front of the “free appearance” [of art], enjoys an autonomy of a very special kind’ (Rancière 2016, 117) – an autonomy of a sense experience. In this way, artworks might contain the potential to open us – or anyone as ‘beholder’ – to new subjects and subjective spaces if they are able to reframe material and symbolic space (Rancière 2016). Thus, engagement with an artwork can be a productive or generative force (Levin 2013) for reorganising – in this case – our knowledge of refugeedom and perhaps for reconfiguring refugee subjects and subjectivities through the distinctive passage from not seeing to seeing, from perceiving to perceiving differently (Noë 2023).

We hope to capture this methodologically through a sociological analysis that embraces the use of the poetic and the lyrical (Abbott 2007). It is an epistemic stance, more fundamentally, that positions the aesthetic experience not as a matter of expertise, but as a way of engaging oneself with the artwork and so articulating our aesthetic responses (Mullen 2022; Noë 2023; Wilder 2020). We are less interested in the artist's own subject position as the main vector of our analysis, than in the ‘attentive act’, or the classic art-historical idea of ‘the beholder's share’ (Gombrich 1960; Riegl 1999). We focus on the interpretive share that the viewer brings in the aesthetic encounter and to how this comes to be core to its meaning; it is itself a generative act. Wilder (2020, 352) articulates the epistemological stance: ‘the [art] object is aesthetic not by virtue of qualities that precede the experience of such an object (that is, guaranteed by production), but only when the encounter with the artwork initiates a specifically aesthetic experience’. To be clear, we do not offer the meanings we assigned to the artworks as universal, but rather as illustrations of the depths of ‘the autonomy of experience’ (Rancière 2016, 117) that come with the Kantian insistence on the egalitarian access to aesthetic judgment.

Therefore, we begin with looking, as art historian Svetlana Alpers advised, not with words (Melville 2013). That is, we focus attention on the materiality of the artwork, its form and formal properties, its ‘physical and signifying totality’ (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 2019, 6), as much as to its to its invisible evocations. We work towards a dense description of the ‘messy mechanics of specific pictures’ (Herbert 2015, 3) as we grapple with what the artwork as meaningful creative object makes available to us. If, as Michael Ann Holly (2013, 15–16) nicely put it, ‘works of art are wrapped round by their own materiality, to which embodied spectators respond’, we attend to the specific artistic choices and signifiers in the artwork, and so to the effect and affect they produce of a refugee subject, of being in the presence of refugeedom.

‘A mere roomful of paintings’

Thus inspired, we offer our own interpretation of the six artworks, which capture something of the Syrian displacement yet are chosen without claiming representativeness – ‘a mere roomful of paintings by a select few artists’ (Herbert 2015, 3). Some artists and artworks are well known and instantly recognisable, others less so: from works by globally recognised artists Banksy and Ai Weiwei, to acclaimed artists from the Middle East – Kourbaj and Zughaib, for instance – some who work from abroad, and other as refugees or immigrants themselves. We arrange the artworks in two ‘rooms’. In the first we place three installations that reference the refugee in flight on a ship or boat, a common visuality of the Syrian ‘refugee crisis’. In the second we also have three artworks, with each a distinctive recasting of Syrian refugeedom. What follows is our own subjective experience as two beholders; it is an articulation of our ‘aesthetic encounter’.

Moral economies

How Heavy it Weighs

Banksy's How Heavy it Weighs invites the viewer to play with the small sculpture of a toy boat (Figure 1). It was initially exhibited in the artist's Dismaland bemusement park in August 2015 in Somerset, England as ‘Dream Boat’. That installation invited parkgoers to very literally ‘play’ with a number of these toy boats in a metaphorical sea; captaining them with remote controller around a coast guard ship, a guard tower and what look like the white hills of Dover, navigating amid dead bodies in the surrounding water. As a replica of these migrant vessels of the Dream Boat installation, How Heavy it Weighs is constructed with fibreglass hull and foam-filled, quick-cast resin figures that are then spray painted. The replica itself is too heavy to float given its wooden base. Banksy raffled Dream Boat to whomever rightly guessed how heavy it weighed, with the proceeds donated to Choose Love, a humanitarian organisation supporting refugees. Immediately jarring is the boat's toy-ness, and the toy-ness of the bodies in and around it. Both as amusement park ride and as toy it gives us the power, or indeed the responsibility, to pilot the bodies inside the boat around those outside it. We thus playfully move from witness to accomplice. And in the process, we become aware of our own otherness. For whose journeys or lives are we responsible? Drawn into the figures in the boat, one is struck by their posture: resignation, loneliness, isolation, numbness. They are a collection of dark, deadened bodies, as if passively awaiting their fate in our hands. Their posture speaks a particular alienation, ‘I’m being carried by these big currents. I’m alone in this boat full of people like me’. With their heads tilted down, one senses their awareness of their own subjectivation. It is submission. And in playing with it, we are complicit.

Figure 1. Top: Banksy. How Heavy it Weighs. 2018/2015. Sculpture. Artist's private collection. Middle: Ai Weiwei. Law of the Journey. 2017. Installation. 60 × 6 × 3 m³. National Gallery Prague. Bottom: Issam Kourbaj. Dark Water, Burning World. 2017. Installation/sculpture. Wood, metal. The British Museum, London.

But who are the ‘we’ to whom they are submitting? The artwork makes us as beholders confront ourselves: are they being trafficked? Are they refugees? Migrants? Who are ‘we’ in relation to them? We are now crawling into a very uncomfortable and ambiguous space, bounced around between saviour and trafficker. As we try to relate, to grasp or understand, we struggle with how we are supposed to feel. It is hard to land. Banksy explicitly asks us ‘how heavy is this boat? How heavy is this load?’ The passengers are unmistakeably black or brown, the reflective spray paint producing on their resin skins the effect of glistening sunlight on sweaty foreheads. As individuals, they seem emaciated, young. Most are male, boys, and a few girls. While they are not looking directly at us, there is an intensity to their crowded ordering on the boat, with their fully buttoned-up jackets, and in the fact that their fate is completely in our hands. And yet whilst they seem to have distinctive features that we can make out, they are somehow not individuals. The longer we contemplate them, the more each figure's individuality cedes. The detailed resin-work initially suggesting human diversity is illusory because each face appears a composite of features randomly shared by other faces. Just like the famous sculpted figurations of the Terracotta Army Warrior statues (dating to 210 BC) of the first Emperor of China, wherein every individual is simply an assemblage, a permutation of the facial features of another, here, too, is a collection of humans, whose individual faces are not their own. But unlike the Terracotta Army statues, whose collectivism is rooted in a non-individualist aesthetic tradition, and so they reference that cultural expression, in the context of this toy boat, this illusion of human individuality works to reinforce our Western, white contemporary tropes of nameless collections of non-white people (Malkki 1996, 388). In this way, Banksy is mediating refugeedom with historical tropes of the slave ship, forcing us into recognising our own whiteness: an effect produced not in the artwork itself but rather in its interaction with the beholder. Were this a painting or a sketch, it might be doing a politics of pity. But as toy, it makes us feel uncomfortable, almost grotesque and revolted as it places our own bodies in a powerfully racialising relation: the submissive posture of black bodies in a boat that we have the power to remotely control jolts us into aligning our power with our whiteness, and yet it does so within the frame of our own racialised projections.

Here we crawl into an even more uncomfortable space. As we reflect on our gaze, the toy boat questions its own ontology – is it a ship of souls or is it a plaything? This ontological instability of the installation continually turns in on itself. Yet this ontological transference also carries a distinct moral and social function; the refugee becomes not a victim, not even our victim, but our racialised plaything. Of what are we now in the presence? The subject of the artwork, already decentred, has shifted from being the refugee or the refugee's flight, to being, quite simply, us. We feel or confront shame, guilt, empathy, power, compassion, sympathy, pity, indignation, anger, sorrow, grief, care. In short, we are not in the presence of lives in flight inside the installation, as much as we are in the presence of our own political subjectivity in the form of our power and responsibility for wider structural injustices (Young 2011).

Law of the Journey

Dark bodies – albeit now faceless – are also the refugee subjects of Ai Weiwei’s (2017) large-scale installation, Law of the Journey. It famously headlined the 21st Sydney Biennale in 2018, despite previous iterations having been embroiled in refugee related controversy (Stephens and Te Ao 2014). The enormous installation is a 60 × 6 × 3 m reinforced rubber boat with an aluminium frame carrying over 300 human-like figures, a few of whom are overboard in the imagined waters around it. Its rubber and aluminium materials are the same as those used in making life rafts and refugee boats, and in fact the factory commissioned by the artist to manufacture Law of the Journey is one that manufactures life rafts (Barry 2019, 210)⁠. The artwork's impact comes from the enormity of its physical dimensions. We are scaled in awe of it. Smooth metal in texture and dark charcoal in colour, there is repetitive anonymity to its almost identically-iterated larger-than-life bodies. We feel small and powerless in its presence. These refugees are on a modern boat, pristine, newer than most refugee-carrying boats. If its huge size makes us feel small in the face of the immensity of the journey and of the multitudes that undertake it, its new-ness – indeed, Barry (2019) alludes to the distinct smell of the new rubber material – contributes to an antiseptic, icy austerity we feel in its presence. This steely and concrete coldness of both the boat and the exhibition space, together with the cold materiality of the bodies, have the feel of a journey across the ocean: freezing, anonymous, exposed. And yet the gestural postures of those on the boat subtly signal something somehow different. They are huddled, protective, holding each other with shoulders slumped inward. There is a reach for warmth and solidarity.

The robotic sameness of the 300 figures removes us from contemplating the condition of an individual refugee to reflecting on the enormity and scale of their collective condition, and to our co-presence in it. Unlike Banksy's Dream Boat, any pretence of individuality here is forgone in favour of repetition. Still, like How Heavy it Weighs, it is similarly reductive through its repetitive mass of faceless humans, flattened and blackened into an abstraction that is suggestive of media visualities of refugee flight. As in Banksy's toy boat installation, there are bodies overboard. And we are also bodily emplaced in the surrounding sea, among those calling for help in the floats. They are struggling but not dead bodies, not yet; they gesture for help with one hand and peddle with the other. Standing amongst them, the viewer is also in the water, or she is part of the water, or among the fish that inhabit the water. We are forced to grapple not only with our own complicity in all of this, but also with our own ontology through our bodily co-presence in their plight. As installation art, both How Heavy it Weighs and Law of the Journey play with our relationship to their size and in being forced to be co-present. By imposing specific geometric properties and dimensions on the physical relationship between artwork and viewer, both invite intimacy as much as they create distance (Griswold, Mangione, and McDonnell 2013, 345). Still, they do this affective work at the cost of the subjects’ reduced subjecthoods; we are suspended, just as they are suspended, in the in-betweenness of refugee and political alter.

Dark Water, Burning World

A third attempt at a refugee-carrying boat, this time without human-like bodies, is Syrian-born Issam Kourbaj’s 2017 installation Dark Water, Burning World, chosen by the British Museum as the 101st object in its History of the World in 100 Objects⁠. This is an evolution of his 2016 series of installations, Another Day Lost, ‘inspired by aerial images of refugee camps’ and made out of waste materials including discarded books, medicine packs and burnt matches (Kourbaj 2020). In 2016, Kourbaj exhibited Dark Water, 2,379 Days and Counting as a community art project at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. He invited viewers to create 2,379 miniature boats out of tin foil and plaster on 17 September 2017 – exactly 2,379 days after the start of the war in Syria. An outgrowth of this, in 2018 Dark Water, Burning World was installed on the floor of King's College Chapel in London, but it now comprised of 12 mudguard boats carrying burnt matches with clear resin holding them together.

Immediately striking are the size and number of the miniature boats as well as the choice of spent matches to stand as figurations of human bodies. Kourbaj was inspired by a 2,500-year-old artefact from Syria held at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge: a miniature model ship made of lead and carrying three goddesses. The material confluences and juxtapositions between a 2,500-year-old lead boat that would have sunk carrying goddesses from Syria and present-day rubber boats carrying people from Syria inspired Kourbaj and led him to mudguards after some experimentation with lead. Whether rubber, lead or mudguards, the function of these materials on boats is to guard people or goddesses from drowning while at sea – ‘but many of my fellow Syrians’, Kourbaj (2020, 253 - emphasis original) explains, ‘were not guarded by the dangerous, flimsy boats, made from cheap, poor-quality rubber. They might as well have been made from lead’. If, as head of the British Museum and producer of the History of the World in 100 Objects radio show Neil MacGregor is quoted as saying, the ‘little convoy of matchstick figures stand[s] for all migrants, anywhere, driven by fear, guided by hope’ (Porter, Tripp, and Morris 2020), that is, if the subject of the installation is the precarity of refugee flight, then the choice of materials also does much of the work of signification: the ‘resin holds the matches upright, suggesting that in desperate times people bond, hold and support each other’ (Kourbaj 2020, 253) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The Phoenician artefact at the Fitzwilliam.

Similarly, the act of burning the matches – which Kourbaj sometimes performatively incorporates into the installations – also does its own meaning: it is a way of ‘tackling the reality of colossal damage’ and a reflection ‘on the trauma that women, children and men carry with them’ (Kourbaj 2020, 253). The spent matches are simultaneously representations of abstract lives utterly consumed and destroyed by refugeedom, and the figurative embodiments of specific lives, huddled together and leaning over, like the bodies in Law of the Journey. In reaching for ‘an emotional landscape’, Kourbaj (2020, 253) explains, his metaphor is not subtle: the ‘lighting of the match, the dying of it and the accumulation of the ashes’. The life-history of the matchsticks across the various iterations of the Dark Waters series suggests, in the full context of the installation, that they are very explicitly located as Syrian refugees and that they are more than that. Padel’s (2020) poem, which accompanies the installation, connects the Syrian refugee experience to more global alterities: ‘ … and their stories our stories/steered by the small/star-light of cell phones … ’⁠.¹ Kourbaj (2020, 253) goes even further: ‘although my images are referencing Syria, I would like them to be universal rather than local. I would like them to be about something whose meaning we all struggle with: home’.

Aesthetic extensions

Sea as Sky

If flight is perceived as an essential dimension of refugee subjecthood, Bouchra Khalili’s 2018 Sea as Sky (Figure 3), reimagines it. It was commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art for the museum section of The New York Times, where it was published on 20 and 27 March. Between 2008 and 2011, Khalili had travelled to European cities used as migrant transit points and filmed refugees narrating their journeys whilst tracing them on a map. The result was The Mapping the Journey Project, and its closing chapter was ‘The Constellation Series’, eight silkscreen prints on paper which pictorially re-imagine those refugee-narrated routes. Sea as Sky emerged out of these.

Figure 3. Left: Bouchra Khalili. Sea as Sky. Poster. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Top right: Helen Zughaib. 2018. Syrian Migration Series #5. Gouache and ink on board. 12″ × 12″. Bottom right: Fadi al-Hamwi. 2017. Irrational Loop of Dust. Concrete. 9 × 139 × 80 cm. Kuwait. Contemporary Art Platform Kuwait.

Instead of a very blue, open Mediterranean, there is a very dark and black infinite sky. The effect recasts and disassociates our visual imaginary of refugee flight from the typical overcrowded boats against the sea's blue vastness. Instead, it emplaces their journeys among astronomers’ star formations. The victim of persecution becomes the pioneer space traveller; the dangers of sinking into the sea give way to the playful charting of interstellar paths. There is a kind of beauty and resilience in navigating the constellations. Our imagination takes flight as well – we no longer imagine a refugee making their way from Libya to Lampedusa, but a star traveller jumping from Orion to the Big Dipper. Its otherworldliness opens a new narrative dimension. It is still flight, but the visual metaphor is gentler, more gracious somehow, more pioneering and adventurous. There is also a romanticism in this, a dis-identification of flight from flight, perhaps even an extending of the sea into the sky.² Khalili gestures at the ambiguity between refugee flight and pioneer flight through an Oscar Wilde quote at the bottom of the map:

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Sea as Sky is a map of refugeedom that includes an otherworldly utopia. The spherical image of Khalili's reimagined universe is purposely borrowed from maps produced in 1154 by Muhammad Al-Idrisi, an Arab scientist, poet and among the founders of modern geography (عبيس 2010). Considered for centuries the most accurate maps of the world, Al-Idrisi's (Figure 4) geographies were oriented with the south at the top. Khalili's Sea as Sky similarly places the Earth in the sky, displacing the geography of flight and thus producing a kind of bounded dis-identification from it. Idrisi might himself have been a refugee – or a pioneer – as his own poetry attests (السعدي 2010, 438):³ ‘I wish [I wrote] my poetry where my grave [will be]/In exile my life has been lost’.⁠⁴ He produced these maps whilst exiled in Sicily from his native present-day Morocco. With Al-Idrisi's (1250) cartographic imagination as inspiration, Khalili's universe is open-ended and uncertain.

Figure 4. A map of the world produced by Muhammad al-Idrisi (circa 1250–1325).

Careful, close-in attention to the named places on the map shows real cities not geographically placed, exactly, but in connect-the-dot tracings of idiosyncratic journeys. Because the cities are randomly adjacent, they look less like cities on refugee routes than uniquely lived tracings of individual lives, each forming its own constellation. For instance, the middle-left constellation from Al-Fashir (capital city of North Darfur, Sudan) passes through unnamed stars on its way to Tripoli (Libya), then to Athens, then through Istanbul to stars left off-frame. While these paths might or might not be composites of real narrated journeys, they gesture at the contingencies of refugee flight. In the middle of Khalili's universe there is an isolated constellation whose shape outlines the contours of Palestine and whose stars are only Palestinian cities: Ramallah, Qalandiya, Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah. Unconnected to the rest of the universe, they form a bounded enclosure from which there is no entry and no exit (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Bouchra Khalili. Sea as Sky. 2019. Silkscreen print on paper BFK Rives. 80 × 60 cm. Edition 5 + 2 AP. Mor Charpentier, Paris.

In this recasting of refugee journeys as constellations, Khalili’s stated aim was

… to produce an ambiguous space that refers to both the sea and the sky, blurring the limits between them, as well as blurring the limits between borders: literally erasing them, by translating the drawings of clandestine journeys into constellations of stars (Schoene 2012, np).

Rupturing its subjects from their assigned position of political alterity, in the artwork the refugee's ‘bare life’ journey becomes richer. As human journey, in Sea as Sky refugeedom looks like something altogether different, romantic, heroic even. Its symbolism is not opaque or hard to read, but in an almost literal sense it is an aesthetic choice that ‘puts together two separate worlds’ (Rancière 2016, 39), and so challenges our normal associations without reduction. The refugee as Luke Skywalker disrupts.

The Syrian Migration Series

An entirely different refugee journey is called up in Helen Zughaib’s 2018 Syrian Migration Series (Figure 3). Zughaib explicitly references Jacob Lawrence’s 1940–1941 Migration Series, whose 60-panel series pictorially narrated the migration of black Americans from the South to cities in the North along existing train routes to Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Los Angeles. If Lawrence's panels were texts of remembrance, personal stories or experiences and moments retold in paint (Nicholas 2013, 37), Zughaib's connect histories of struggle. ‘Panel No 1’ of Lawrence's series (Figure 6) depicts migrants rushing in a railway station, seeking, in Richard Wright's beautiful elicitation, ‘the warmth of other suns’. Zughaib places her similarly angular and modernist figures crossing thresholds to European states, presumably in similar search. We see them as moments of recognition, as it were, which conjure ‘provocative adjacencies’ (the term is Lorensen’s 2006, 582).

Figure 6. Jacob Lawrence (1940–1941). Migration Series – Panel no. 1: “During the World War there was a great migration North by Southern Negroes” (text and title revised by Lawrence in 1993). Casein tempera on hardboard. 12″ × 18″. Washington, DC. The Philips Collection.

In doing this, Zughaib disidentifies the Syrian refugee from her contemporary construction and recontextualises her journey in alignment with the political alterities of migration. But in so explicitly aligning with Lawrence's work, she is also joining in his stated intention that, in dealing with the black struggle – and indeed the refugee struggle – ‘my paintings deal with the human condition’ (Lawrence quoted in Nicholas 2013, 266). The allegorical resonances are similarly unmistakeable. These are ways out of persecution and oppression and into imagined promises of dignity and equality, maybe even hope. There is a deeper resonant narrative of all human journeying, not just those of refugeedom and (post)slavery. If Sea as Sky transposes refugeedom to the heavens, Syrian Migration Series does the work of both historical and human allyship. The refugee subject, in other words, is not disidentified exactly, but the condition of refugeedom is dislodged from its present real-world position and aligned alongside another historical narrative.

Most striking is Zughaib's use of lighter versions of Lawrence's colour palette. Deeply shaped by the colours of the Depression-era Harlem Renaissance and under the influence of Bauhaus artists’ use of space, line, colour, form and shape, Lawrence understood how a colour scheme ‘contests the eye and its culture’ (Lorensen 2006, 573). His ‘migration colours’ drew from a very restricted palette of primary colours – green, red, blue, yellow, brown and black. Yet as Lorensen (2006, 576–582) hints, colour may not be only an attribution but also a connection to something, and perhaps to the way in which sorrow need not be expressed in muted colours, especially if it is to take us elsewhere. Zughaib's colours are the same, but more washed out, with a lighter feel. ‘Part of my objective in trying to get my message across is to create the work so that it's palatable to people’, Zughaib explains (in Khalel 2019, np):

I don't want to disgust them, I don't want to horrify them. You know, there's a lot of stuff in [my series] that's very horrifying – if you know anything about the situation, it's brutal – but if someone comes in off the street and looks at these paintings, they’ll be able to look at them without it being too much.

Zughaib's bright, yet gentler tonalities of colour are intended to ‘get [the viewer] to the painting. Then they can do their own research once the interest is sparked’. The positioning of the angular, abstract figures also does its affective work – in both representations. While in Lawrence the figures are both walking away and in profile, in Zughaib's there is only one woman in profile as she exits frame-left. The diagonal positioning of Lawrence's figures tells us they are in rushed motion to catch trains; whilst Zughaib's are waiting or walking into ports of entry. There is something of a group portrait in both, wherein the Rückenfigur, as pictorial device, works to place us in their space, walking behind them or with them through the thresholds. This device works to place us – like them – at the rift between flight and safety, loss and welcome even as we stand outside the frame. In the two-dimensional pictorial space, the Rückenfigur does something similar to our emplacements in the installations. Despite the flattened canvas, then, between the pictorial coherence within the frame and that coherence that is achieved once the viewer's presence enters, there is an invitation.

Irrational Loop of Dust

If, as Édouard Glissant (1997, 191–192) argues, the opaque is ‘the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence’, and so the most open of invitations, Fadi Al-Hamwi’s (2017) Irrational Loop of Dust (Figure 4) does open invitation in its resistance to interpretation. This concrete artwork has motifs reminiscent of a Persian carpet or a prayer rug. Its dimensions are larger than a doormat, smaller than Persian rugs placed at the centre of living rooms, but consistent with the dimensions of prayer mats or welcome rugs usually placed at the entrance corridor of many Middle Easter flats. Prayer mat or Persian rug, we are in the presence of a fine, noble object. One that is meant to welcome a guest or communion with God; a passage space to and from something that commands respect. The title throws us, however. How does a concrete carpet become an irrational loop of dust? The meanings slip. In the absence of any more transparent signifiers, we might contextualise the work within its wider circulations. Al-Hamwi ‘concerns himself with lending physical shape to the human experience of war’, by which ‘domestic furnishings … offer traces of the lack of humanity in the everyday experience of conflict’ (East of Elsewhere 2018a, 39). It is a recreation of Al-Hamwi's ‘family's carpet in concrete’, with the artist ‘replicating its ornate pattern and rubbing out its places of wear’ (East of Elsewhere 2018b). Here, then, a fine noble object with a dense past life.

It is interesting that concrete is called ‘dust’, which is what happens when concrete is blown up. Homes become dust. The rational human loop is ‘dust to dust’; war irrationalises this loop. It takes us to dust before we are supposed to go. There is also the fold of the rug, which we experience as dissonance from its intended function – to welcome, to usher, to decorate. The fold gives the impression that someone had started to roll it – as if to put it away – and then stopped. This makes us think of flight, perhaps a moment in which they changed their mind; this rug it is too heavy to carry in flight. We might then understand the artwork as also speaking of that moment of rupture, the moment in which we leave before we had intended to go. The artwork is also heavy in a different way. On the fold is a name plate, which would detail dates, specifications and origins. Unlike the universalising work done by the concreteness of the rug's representation of war, the aesthetic choice of an authentic Persian rug itself contains deeper cultural significance in the wider Middles East, stretching its diffractions to Turkey and Armenia. Yet the fold maintains the ambiguity of its ontology. Is the fold an aesthetic choice meant to convey the authenticity of this fine art Persian rug? This anchors it in a cultural recognisability and adds further weight to it. It is the weight attached to the everyday furnishings, which flight to that place from this place leaves behind.

Reflections

In the first room, the emotional geography created by the three boat installations is evocative of J.M.W. Turner’s (1840s) famous abolitionist-inspired painting, Slave Ship (Figure 7). Originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead or the Dying – Typhon Coming On, Turner's compelling representation is of a slaving ship whose captain threw dead and dying slaves overboard to claim insurance for those lost at sea (Costello 2012). It puts us in the presence of the violence and cruelty of slaving, and, more contentiously, in the presence of nature's force as Sublime. If Banksy and Ai Weiwei achieve this through the dead or dying bodies in the waters, the combustion of Kourbaj's matchsticks produces an effect similar to that of Slave Ship's troubled waters. Of course, materially and aesthetically Slave Ship is entirely different from How Heavy it Weighs or Law of the Journey or Dark Water, Burning World. But the affective impact is remarkably similar because they work in similar ways conceptually. The chained slave's leg in the bottom right corner is closest to the viewer standing before it, and it puts us in the fierce waters. The leg's distinctly drawn and stark lines make the emotional impact even more intense by way of contrast with the indistinctness of the ship in the mid-distance and the heavily brush-worked waves of the storming sea. Apart from conjuring obvious allusions of refugee ships with slave ships, the three installations, like Turner's pictorial depiction of the inhumanity of slavery, call us to moral commitment. Yet they do so by way of situating suffering – victimised and disembodied – abstract subjects within the moral economies of refugeedom and slavery. Whilst Banksy's and Ai Weiwei's subjects are suffering, Kourbaj goes one further in his disembodied abstraction of refugees as spent matches, suggesting also an irreversibility of condition. In this way of engaging alterity, albeit for didactic purposes, they present subjects through a certain ontological essentialism, one marked by deficit.

Figure 7. J.M.W. Turner. The Slave Ship. 1840. Oil on canvas. 91 × 123 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Despite obviously differing sizes and aesthetic choices, all three boat installations work on us in similar ways because in decentring us, the beholders, they work position us inside an imagined and autonomous realm in which we become not only subjects of the artwork but even agents in its possibilities. Still, if this kind of aesthetic device has the potential for challenging our relationship to alterity, and even perhaps our moral imaginations, it is also the case that another set of aesthetic choices works in the other direction. All three installations open perspectives – very literally bodily ones – for entering the experience of flight, and refugeedom more generally. But we are always navigating ourselves in the presence of subjects without subjectivities. We are drawn into what we think might be the artworks’ meaning, and affectively into some dimension of suffering or injustice within their experience, yet it happens by way of an objectified subject devoid of subjective presence. Like Turner's Slave Ship, there are bodily presences, and hard and cold corporeal sufferings, but there is a psychological and agentic absence. Through aesthetic attention to our emplacement in a structural relationship of racialised power, we see not their political subjectivities but rather our own. Moralistic or edifying, the evocation is of a particular aesthetics of suffering which calls us to responsibility, to a relationality towards empathy (Evans 2021; Young 2011). The installations are accusations. Thus, they speak less about the refugee or the refugee experience than they do the ‘moral economies of our era in which they find their place’ (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 279).

In the second room, by contrast, we engaged with denser, more historicised and temporally opaque subjects. Who are these pioneers of space travel? What interstellar paths are they charting in Sea as Sky? What life histories turned them into pioneering astronauts? Back on Earth, Syrian Migration Series placed us in a busy train station deliberating what all the bustle was about. Who are these colourful figures rushing to Turkey, Germany or France? Why the urgency? The explicit linkages between Lawrence's and Zughaib's Migration Series impelled further questions because we have beheld such urgency at a train station before. As we grappled with who these rushing people are, with what they are rushing towards and why, a certain historical familiarity emerged within our sense of wonder. There was also a certain affective familiarity, as if we had encountered each other in a past life or through the history of humankind. A moment of historical déjà-vu, of sorts. Irrational Loop of Dust similarly parachuted us into a particular moment, albeit this time seemingly after all the other human beings had left. It was just us and a concrete rug; a particular assemblage of dust particles whose characteristics we grappled with as it oscillated between interpretable concrete motifs to dust and back, ad infinitum in an irrational loop. What kind of rug was it? Whose rug was it? Where was it emplaced? What was its function? More: was this the original rug that was rendered into dust, or one iteration of the re-coalescence of dust particles into rug? All three artworks were in different ways historically rooted while maintaining certain individual ambiguity: Khalili's astronauts navigated in the stars geographically identifiable refugee routes on Earth; Zughaib's hijabi characters seemed recent refugees charting similar thresholds as Lawrence's free citizens; Hamwi's rug was probably owned by people in the Middle East, or at least by people who had Middle Eastern friends. As refugee art, these were refugeedom's historical subjects, indeed ‘like escaping slaves attempting to free themselves from the increasingly suffocating national order of things by travelling in its shadows and through its cracks’ (Hage 2016, 44). Unlike the ontological deficit of the refugee flight in the first room, however, in this room flight was also a blazing of trails, flight pioneers

transgressing and crossing the class/apartheid border between the world where national borders are made to be so extremely important and where they are enslaved and forced to remain, and the borderless world of smooth global sailing that remains the reserve of the economic and cultural upper classes. (ibid)

To be sure, the artworks in these two rooms are not intended as representative of art around the Syrian ‘refugee crisis’, let alone refugee art more broadly. And the affective intensities occasioned by these aesthetic encounters transcend their indexing as categories, histories and ontologies. Yet they are instructive, especially in the light of Edward Said’s (1984, 513) famous distinction:

 … some distinctions can be made between exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés. Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider. Refugees, on the other hand, are a creation of the 20th century state. The word ‘refugee’ has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas ‘exile’ carries with it … a touch of solitude and spirituality.

Tracing Said's distinction within these aesthetic encounters allows more textured access into refugee art's disruptive capacities. For us, the subject of the artworks in the first room was the moral economy of refugeedom, and the refugee was object in this narrative, a mere plaything of structural forces. In this room, we are citizens, individuals, beholders – and we are complicit, passive witnesses, enablers of these structural forces. In the second room, the subject of the artworks was the reimagined figure of the refugee, but the artworks’ affect was to transform us into perceiving differently. The real-world practices, perceptions and sensations associated with refugeedom were broken by placing us in the presence of the refugee as pioneer, as freed men and women, or in the ordinariness of their living room. As the aesthetic encounter has the potential to wrest the modern-day refugee away from its bureaucratic and humanitarian categorisations and into the more aestheticiseable realm of exile, we move from being in the presence of a reduced subjecthood to and being in the presence of an aestheticised subjecthood.

Both rooms rupture the real-world relationship between refugee and art beholder (that is, us or anyone) via aesthetic experience and recast this relationship as political proposition. Whether it is the ‘scandal’ of modern refugeedom that breaks us from beholder to enabler in the first room, or the move from Said's refugee to his exile that the second room occasions, the affective intensities of the aesthetic experience enact something much more complex than the assumption that ‘art compels us to revolt when it shows us revolting things’ (Rancière 2016, 135). Rather, the artworks in the second room unsettle ‘the way in which bodies fit their functions and destinations’, producing ‘a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relations between bodies, the world where they live and the way in which they are ‘equipped’ for fitting it’ (Rancière 2008, 11). Refugee artworks can – sometimes – stage occasions for creating scenes of relationality which do not exist or have not been previously imagined, so the aesthetic encounter can open up a ‘rift’, even if momentary, in our ordinary forms of seeing and perceiving refugeedom. This kind of deep aesthetic engagement with artworks can enable a different epistemic access to the experiences of the forcibly displaced, and so put us into relation with refugees in ways not otherwise available through activist, political or humanitarian representations of refugeedom.

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