A curatorial study of migration in arts

This research studies the practice of curatorial activities in arts about migration, focusing on contemporary art after 2000. This research is qualitative and uses a grounded theory approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 13 participants, including artists, curators and NGO representatives working on exhibitions or art projects about migration and the visual arts. I propose a curatorial model to study how artworks interact with social and political concepts that focus on truth, political perspective, and societal action. These concepts rely on Hannah Arendt’s theory and are used extensively by other contemporary philosophers, sociologists and art theorists.

These debates are organised into three main sections, About Body, On Paper and At Border. In About Body, I discuss the movement of people and memory and identity. In On Paper, I argue that the notion of citizenship relies on a passport as a necessary document and as the demonstration of the right to have rights, a key concept in Hannah Arendt’s work. Finally, within the third section, named At Border, geographical as well as national borders are studied and how these appear in artworks. Each part of the thesis examines individual and collective projects to answer different questions regarding the curatorial strategies and methods that have been examined in art about migration.

I examine how the socio-political subject of migration is produced to investigate the gap between reality and what is presented as truths about migration. I argue that the representation of a migrant’s narrative or movement across borders is not enough to provide a truth-telling about what migration means because these ideas need to be put into action. I claim that a curatorial approach to an artwork can convert its ideas into action for both the migration subject and the subject of migration.