On the Move

Displacement has always had a crucial role in shaping and reshaping human societies. Any number of factors—war, famine, persecution, environmental calamity, depletion of resources, poverty—have caused massive populations to move to alien habitats for survival, often permanently. Through the last century, it has become central to the lives of millions around the world. Human displacement is, in fact, one of the defining attributes of the current era.A legal distinction separates two kinds of displaced persons or groups: “refugees” and “migrants.” Though refugees migrate, they are not legally migrants.1 Forced to flee war, persecution, or natural catastrophe and risking starvation, torture, or death upon return to their countries of origin, refugees qualify for protection under international refugee laws. Migrants, on the other hand, are believed to move voluntarily, most commonly in search of better living conditions. Ineligible for asylum, they are treated according to the immigration laws of the countries to which they migrate. This distinction often becomes blurred, however. For instance, those who leave home to escape the violence of organized crime face the risk of persecution and death if forced to return, yet they are not sheltered by international refugee laws. The same goes for people who move to escape dire poverty and starvation in their lands of origin. While disputing these legal definitions is not the purpose of this essay, it does consider the so-called migrant scenarios described above as that of involuntary displacement. If “voluntary” connotes willingness in some form, then anyone’s decision to leave what they consider home to face an uncertain and perilous journey can hardly be regarded as a voluntary undertaking.The most familiar lens used to understand disparate contexts of involuntary displacement is that of human suffering, the lowest common denominator across race, ethnicity, class, and other such specificities. The underlying idea is that as one’s individual identities and positions of privilege are made irrelevant by the existential crisis of forced removal, one is left with the sole condition of being human. And yet, such identifiers as race, ethnicity, and religious persuasion of a displaced population are never far from the surface. Despite attempts to underscore the humanitarian aspect of refugee crises, for instance, the term “refugee” has predominantly stood for people of color (frequently non-Christian) because most involuntary displacements in modern times have involved precisely that demographic from the Global South. These two opposing aspects attributed to victims of forced displacement—identifying them as humans entitled to receive empathy versus labeling them as undesired Other—have created a glaring double standard that has forcefully come to the fore in recent years, most prominently since the beginning of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.Media reports of Ukrainian refugees being welcomed in neighboring Poland, Romania, and other countries with food, shelter, healthcare, and work permits at the beginning of the Russian incursion routinely demonstrate the deep empathy of the hosting nations. One could have comfortably labeled such efforts genuine humanitarian generosity, had the governments and the media of some of those same countries (including Ukraine, ironically) not shown open hostility toward Syrian refugees just a few years ago. Seen in that light, the double standard becomes abundantly clear. Under the veneer of warm humanitarian gestures, the European compassion for the Ukrainian refugees is, in fact, grounded in racial, religious, and continental affinities, and in the Global North’s self-interest in sending a unified message to the aggressor, Vladimir Putin. When Caucasian Christian Europeans are in distress, it is easy to cast aside the internal racial biases between Nordic and Slavic whiteness, the significant ethnic differences within Europe, and the denominational differences within the Christian faith in favor of a heartwarming brand of humanism. When the asylum seekers are Arab Muslims, on the other hand, their racial and cultural otherness puts that humanist empathy of many of the same European nations to the test, only to expose virulent xenophobia and racism. The political factor behind this shift is the Global North’s reluctance to protest the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by sheltering refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war.It is telling how sparsely the media have used the label “refugee” to refer to the Ukrainians leaving their homeland and how often journalists have confessed their shock that such a catastrophe is happening on European soil, adding that conflicts like it are normal in other parts of the world. Such an unabashed display of prejudice by Western democracies in the twenty-first century turns the popular convention of a humanist approach to victims of all forced displacements into a cruel joke.Human plight is among the most common subjects in contemporary art. In recent decades, however, many artists have freshly invested in exposing the complexities of involuntary displacement across the planet, with particular attention to the marginalization and trauma of displaced people of color. This essay discusses three such projects by four artists, one of which is a collaborative effort. All three have received a fair degree of international exposure through multiple exhibitions, and critics have emphatically recognized how they illuminate the different aspects of the circumstances of displacement around the world. Against the backdrop of the double standard in the treatment of displaced people from the Global South exposed by the Ukrainian crisis, this essay sheds light on the specific contributions of these projects to the unmasking of the consistent denial in the Global North of the humanity of the displaced. An introduction to each followed by a discussion of the overlaps and differences between them demonstrate how they address crucial humanitarian issues around displacement that are marginalized, if not entirely excluded, by mainstream media.Deeply interested in the issues around transgression of political borders, exile, and nomadism, Bouchra Khalili is a Moroccan-born French multimedia artist who lives and works in Berlin. The process of cartography and the metaphorical roles of maps are central to her work, of which The Mapping Journey Project is a powerful example. Between 2008 and 2011, Khalili filmed eight accounts of journeys of migrants and refugees from multiple countries who crossed international borders in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. On each of eight single-channel monitors, a person of color, only their hand visible, traces a journey on a map with a permanent marker, narrating their ordeal in a language of their choosing (with English subtitles).National boundaries are often the result of historic disputes and negotiations, many of them violent. Yet nations and their borders on maps appear as little more than benign abstractions signifying the quasi-sacred notion of national sovereignty while obscuring their own identity as historical constructs. In Khalili’s work, the spurious finality of borders is brutally subverted by the irreverent, crude lines of the marker tracing the journeys of desperate individuals whose national identities have long been overshadowed by existential urgencies. They invoke what the artist calls “a parallel geography,” a symbolic form of resistance by the narrators to the existing geopolitical order.2 The use of maps, as Omer Berrada observes, leads to a “counter cartography” in these narratives. “By inscribing this path on the map,” Berrada remarks, “they (re)claim the forced trajectory as their own…They free it from imposed political boundaries.”3 This subversion, however, comes at a cost unfathomable to someone without the narrators’ experience. The verbal account is strikingly factual: a journey fraught with uncertainties and hostile confrontations such as detention, betrayal, long waits for legal approval, and deportation is described in detail, without any display of emotions or personal reflections.The most powerful aspect of the presentation involves the anonymity of the narrators. Showing only a hand holding a marker on a map, with the rest of the person’s identity cropped save for their voice, the narrative at each station is simply numbered (“Mapping Journey #1,” etc.). The subject, in short, is presented as a disembodied Other. “I believe that respecting the ‘opacity’ of otherness opens up to a decolonized conception of universality,” says Khalili. “And even when faces are shown in my other works…there’s still a sense of opacity that is preserved, relying on a sense of ‘distancing’ effect.”4 This distancing, coupled with the unfamiliarity of the ordeal of the subjects, makes it initially uncomfortable for one to sit on the bench (without a backrest) facing a monitor and listen to the recollection through headphones.5 Gradually, however, the sheer determination of the subjects to not capitulate to the seemingly insurmountable task of transgressing national boundaries causes the shroud of anonymity to lift partially to expose a glimpse of an individual with hopes and dreams. This realization deepens as one moves through all of the stations. While the otherness of the subjects is never fully resolved for a non-migrant audience, the assertion of their humanity, with its persistent claim to the right to have decent lives, becomes deeply palpable.The gallery floor is strewn with a wide variety of men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing. At first glance, it seems donated clothes are carelessly dumped on the floor, awaiting further sorting—or perhaps simply being thrown away as garbage. Surviving the initial confusion of identifying it as a work of art, one would likely assume that the project is some sort of in-your-face statement about the mindless consumerism of the current era and its adverse environmental consequences.A more careful perusal of the site, however, reveals curious details: the clothing items are not casually thrown to the floor but thoughtfully placed, with more dense accumulation in one corner and a gradual dispersal toward the center of the room, where individual garments are strategically arranged; all the pieces have shades of blue; scattered among the clothes are an occasional solitary piece of footwear; and finally, in the zone where they are spread out, each item startlingly mimics a human body in distress.Born in France to Algerian parents and working between Berlin and Algiers, Kader Attia is deeply committed to the history of colonization and its aftermath, which offers him strategies to negotiate the two aspects of his own identity. He looks through the lens of the disruption and violence caused by the colonial aggressions of the past and connects them to the geopolitical instabilities of the present, and the faceless victims of that historical trauma are his protagonists.It is only when one notices the title of the work that the content begins to emerge. While La Mer Morte translates as “Dead Sea,” it does not refer to the massive Salt Lake bordering Jordan and Israel that bears that name; rather, it is the Mediterranean that the title signifies. Attia, in this installation from 2015, memorializes the displaced lives tragically lost by drowning while trying to cross the waters into Europe on overcrowded, precarious boats. The blue present in varying degrees in every single garment as a reference to the deep waters adds an emotionally charged poetic touch to the untold narratives of the tragic consequences of displacement. This appeal becomes particularly powerful against the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crisis happening around the same time Attia executed the piece (who could forget Alan Kurdi, the two-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed ashore near the Turkish resort of Bodrum when the boat he was on capsized on its way to Greece?). It must be noted that of the three projects discussed here, the international legal definition of “refugee” would certainly apply to many of Attia’s subjects; yet they, too, have largely been treated as migrants.Attia’s use of clothing is as captivating as it is a strikingly simple strategy. There is no question that he is indebted to Christian Boltanski’s Reserve, Canada (1988) and the monumental Personnes (2010). But Attia’s approach to clothing is markedly different. While Boltanski uses garments en masse to underscore humanity in its totality, Attia pays greater attention to their ontological connection to the human body to make them surrogates for individuals in peril. That the secondhand clothes used here have all been in touch with individual bodies adds to the potency of this connection. Once this is recognized from the accompanying information in the gallery, each of the anthropomorphic articles, with its folds and crumples, is transformed into a living marker of human suffering that inevitably assumes a different shape every time it is installed in an exhibition. Looking at the carefully composed contortions of the clothing, especially in the section where they are placed apart from one another, it is difficult to avoid imagining disturbing images of actual corpses; the individual characters of the isolated items forcefully summon images of lifeless bodies left behind by a violent tragedy. The occasional presence of shoes intensifies this image. As one looks on, the gallery floor gradually becomes a gruesome but solemn mass grave site, albeit with emphasis on the individuality of those who are lost in anonymity. Unlike the vocal accounts of The Mapping Journey Project, here the pervasive presence of death offers silent narratives. Notable is the twist in the phrasing of the title: while Sea of Death (“La Mer de la Mort”) would seem the logical title of the installation, Attia refers to the body of water itself as dead in La Mer Morte, as if it is the ocean that is cursed.Unauthorized entry into the United States across its borders with Mexico has long been a populist issue in American politics, about which much of the general population of the country seems to have a wide range of opinions. Yet most have little familiarity with the daily realities at the border. An American photographer and a Mexican American musician collaborated to bring to light several aspects of that scenario: Richard Misrach, who has been photographing the southern desert for decades and the southern border since 2012, and Guillermo Galindo, who introduced a unique dimension to Misrach’s visual project.A canto is a segment of a long poem. Misrach’s body of photographs has eight cantos, each capturing an aspect of the US-Mexico border. The deep in the American desert is in his that in from which in One of the in the project offers images of the the two countries at the two from to the of The photographs a variety in the that is commonly regarded as Unlike an American such as the of a the border to Misrach, is and In his photographs in the desert where the humanitarian on the American water for each station with a it can be recognized from a In yet traces of by American border such as a range with up in the and a massive number of scattered on the canto has an uncomfortable its surface. For instance, American as as border often the water at the the border of and the human at the range become of the American of migrants as an Other. All the are of human yet of the images a single human of on human presence without any bodies a powerful in the canto from to between and an on the desert water was left by border most displaced people around the those who are initially in the southern borders make every to their with to And in the the left behind the only to the of their desperate The variety of against the backdrop of offers a glimpse into the individual of Though from their the of each thoughtfully as a entry into the of an whose like their the migrant at the border every to and the of this is by the occasional presence of children’s massive made from many such photographs in a becomes a to the desperate lives in the history of American from the of parts of Mexico its in the century, to the ordeal of migrant journey through the southern desert as one of the historical consequences of that One this aspect of border than at the border as an be the history and of such more and the boundaries and the that on border not simply the result of by and national It is an and where the and of multiple political past and present, in and often tragic Galindo, with since 2012, a and a to Misrach’s visual of the of the border. a range of from the border by Misrach, and pieces of the makes curious that are for his Misrach’s each of is as a canto in and like Misrach’s eight cantos, his is a piece eight in this project is grounded in the in the of the with which an is made from the He in the from the by most of and those only does the of and from the become an to the of but it a solemn in the the and the by them have a powerful with Misrach’s different from the human of Khalili’s work, here seem to the of the has and that any are as and as the or or his bring to the that to from the this is not simply and from these is their that what does not and that the that them receive an three projects a at the of migrant around the and to the glaring of the current geopolitical Yet each of them the of these journeys While Kader Attia’s installation adds the finality of death to this disturbing Bouchra Khalili’s work on the of the who to cross borders only to Richard and Guillermo on the other hand, offers an the solemn by the of human and the made from them leave the several and tragic is the of each work the of the of displacement. the ocean as a backdrop to some of Khalili’s Attia’s garments are of bodies washed ashore with the ocean in the with and Galindo, the central role of the desert be in the of the border those forced to flee the in Ukraine are emphatically recognized as individuals and displaced people of color around the as undesired are routinely that identity. humanity is by the legal distinction between migrants and refugees and by the emphasis on around immigration at the of the human ordeal or the circumstances to one’s decision to move in the first The four artists here attention to that anonymity but use the notion of to the humanity of the Attia uses of the body on the connection between one’s body and their a that a of human spread across the gallery and Galindo, on the other hand, work with traces of the presence of the that are to individual lives than to the body Khalili a of the body to make traces that offers individual Though specific individuals never come to the fore in any of these a sense of individuality in each the faceless otherness of migrants of color that largely popular captivating than any media these works of and like them are particularly because they bring to light not only the plight of involuntary but the of the displaced in the face of disparate of on their in the Global South.

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