Migrant Forms: Contemporary Art, Colonial Pasts

The drama of human displacement, and the force of the backlash mounted against it, is one of the defining crises of our times. This talk will offer a critical reflection on the space of this crisis and explore its implications for the visual arts. It will focus, in particular, on contemporary artistic responses to postcolonial migration—arguably the most urgent paradigm for statelessness in the twenty-first century, rooted in the histories of colonization and enslavement and in the geopolitical divide between the global north and south. Across painting, sculpture, installation, and the layered languages of multi-media practice, I show how artists engage with migration and dispossession not simply as a haunted echo of the past, but as a more recursive, fractured condition in the present animated by the persistence of historical inequalities.

Organised by Elena Crippa (Senior Curator of Contemporary Art) and Leyla Arrianne Bumbra (Head of Research Forum) at The Courtauld.