Understanding Displacement Aesthetics - by Ana Carden-Coyne & Charles Green & Chrisoula Lionis & Angeliki Roussou (Hardcover)

About the Book

Understanding displacement aesthetics explores how visual culture and art shape and challenge ideas about forced displacement. Bridging cultural and art history with curatorial studies, it offers a new framework for 'displacement aesthetics' and highlights artistic and institutional responses to refugeedom.

Book Synopsis

Since the Second World War and the formalisation of the international refugee regime, forced displacement has been marked by a set of aesthetic, practical, and institutional concerns. Understanding Displacement Aesthetics examines how visual culture and art practice constructs and challenges ideas about forced displacement and refugees. The novel framework for 'displacement aesthetics' moves beyond conventional understandings of aesthetics as merely representational, demonstrating the entanglement of visual culture, art practices, and forced displacement in postmigrant contexts. Bringing together the fields of cultural history, art history, and curatorial studies, Understanding Displacement Aesthetics identifies four areas for consideration: visual tropes of refugeedom; language and identity; institutional and artistic responses to displacement; and lived experiences of artists with backgrounds of displacement. Through archival research, visual culture and art, interviews, and collaborative curatorship, Understanding Displacement Aesthetics offers new insight into overcoming the limitations that contexts of displacement can present for artists, art galleries and institutions addressing refugeedom and its legacies.

From the Back Cover

'This groundbreaking volume critically engages with debates on art and displacement, while also advancing vital reflections on ethical practices in museums working with artists of refugee backgrounds - offering rich insights for scholars and students in the intersecting fields of cultural history, art history, and curatorial studies.'
--Professor Anne Ring Petersen, University of Copenhagen

With the rise of humanitarianism and international refugee laws in the 20th century, visual representations of refugees and their forced displacement permeated the cultural sphere. Understanding displacement aesthetics offers a groundbreaking analysis of the role of visual culture, art and art museums in shaping ideas about people forced to flee. The book identifies the refugee as a cultural figure, analysing the longer history of visual motifs and tropes and their ongoing presence in the contemporary world. Highlighting displaced artists in contemporary contexts, the book explores the barriers they face and their aesthetic outcomes. Language, identity and labour are identified as critical factors informing how art is made, curated, collected and understood by the public.

Advancing the new concept of 'displacement aesthetics' - the negotiation of representation, lived experience and institutions - the interdisciplinary research underpinning this book provides a major intervention into the fields of cultural history, art history, and museum studies. Combining archival research, analysis of art, and curatorial research with artists and museums, Understanding displacement aesthetics presents new insights into the role of art and culture in mediating this pressing social and political issue in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Review Quotes

'This groundbreaking volume critically engages with debates on art and displacement, while also advancing vital reflections on ethical practices in museums working with artists of refugee backgrounds - offering rich insights for scholars and students in the intersecting fields of cultural history, art history, and curatorial studies.'
--Professor Anne Ring Petersen, University of Copenhagen

About the Author

Professor Ana Carden-Coyne is Director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester
Charles Green is Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne