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. 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