HMKK03236U Modern Culture: Migratory Aesthetics: Migratory Aesthetics: Globalisation, Migration and Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Art, Film and Literature

Migratory Aesthetics:  Globalisation, Migration and Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Art, Film and Literature

In the 20th and 21st centuries, a growing number of people have left their homes to cross state borders and settle in another country. At the threshold of the 21st century, the former head of the UN, Kofi Annan, thus declared that we have entered “a new age of migration”. Globalisation also means that a growing number of artists have a background in migration, or have developed nomadic patterns of work in connection with exhibitions and residencies in different countries. At the same time art itself is hybridised and crosses borders with an unprecedented speed. The various cultural effects of these historical conditions and phenomena have been comprised under the concept of migratory aesthetics, coined by cultural theorist Mieke Bal.

The course aims to highlight some of the cultural effects of migration and globalisation as well as to sharpen the historical and contextual understanding of recent cross-cultural phenomena, i.e. the historicity of ‘the global contemporary’. To do this, it focuses on a number of issues and theories that have a wider relevance to the study of contemporary culture and identity formation - in keywords: globalisation and migration, (trans)cultural identity and memory, hybridisation and cultural translation, post- and decoloniality, racialisation and structural discrimination. Most of the examples will be taken from the visual arts, but film and literature will also be given some consideration. The course thus examines the historical causes of the transformation of the arts and the art world (due to migration and globalisation), but also seeks to analyse and understand what is at stake in terms of content and form in works by artists such as Mona Hatoum, Yinka Shonibare, Isaac Julien, Jeannette Ehlers, Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Danh Vo and Shirin Neshat.