Art and Migration Migration – Darwin College Lecture Series 2018

This lecture performance will present art by and about the migrant, created in workshops run for detainees awaiting deportation from the UK. Documentary photography, drawings, testimonies, video, and interviews, digitized for the Immigration Detention Archive at Oxford is the basis of this art-research. The presentation will include parts of a play written and directed using material from the forthcoming book, including collages, shadow puppets, and film.

In the study of migration art has been relegated to therapy and social work, and in turn art history and criticism typically categorizes it as Outsider Art. Yet in this study of the effects of indeterminate detention on subjectivity, visual art contributes to social and aesthetic demands as well as providing forensic evidence for criminologists of human suffering. It is an artist’s perspective on the perversity of the institutions, the power of its bureaucracy, and a necessary abstraction of censored material.