Art for Coexistence Unlearning the Way We See Migration, Christine Ross

These installations, videos, virtual reality works, webcasts, sculptures, graffiti, paintings, photographs, and a rescue boat, by artists including Banksy, Ai Weiwei, Alejandro Gonzбlez Iсбrritu, Laura Waddington, Tania Bruguera, and others, demonstrate arts power to mediate experiences of migration. Ross argues that art invents a set of interconnected calls for more mutual forms of coexistence: to historicize, to become responsible, to empathize, and to story-tell. Art history, Ross tells us, must discard the legacy of imperialist museology--which dissocializes, dehistoricizes, and depoliticizes art. It must reinvent itself, engaging with political philosophy, postcolonial, decolonial, Black, and Indigenous studies, and critical refugee and migrant studies.