Baggage Claims: Contemporary Art’s Migration Imaginary

Subodh Gupta, Sat Samandar Par (Vehicle for the Seven Seas II). Cast aluminium and bronze, 2003.
20 Mar 2025 04.30 PM - 06.00 PM Gaia, LT 2 Alumni, Current Students, Industry/Academic Partners, Prospective Students, Public
Organised by:
Roger Nelson

The relation between belonging and belongings – the actual physical property carried by migrants on their journeys – in the multi-media field of contemporary art has a long tradition of material practice.  It can be seen to begin with the modernist trope of the “suitcase” or “valise” as it emerged within the European tradition of the historical avant-garde.  My presentation will show how artists today, especially from the global South, deploy material and pictorial strategies that both build upon and abandon the nostalgic terms of these “suitcase stories” in ways that evoke more precarious and perilous pathways for the migrant in the 21st century.  By connecting these insights to the forms of labor historically attached to baggage, to the racialized figures, for example, of the “Coolie” or “the Pullman Porter,” I propose to consider a broader dialectic between possessions and dispossession in the field of the visual arts. 

Saloni Mathur is Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Ford Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for 2024/25. Her areas of interest include modern and contemporary South Asian art; migration, diaspora, and postcolonial criticism; decolonization and aesthetics; and museum studies in a global frame. Her most recent book, A Fragile Inheritance: Radical Stakes in Contemporary Indian Art, was published by Duke University Press in 2019 and is available on-line as part of an Open-Access initiative at the following link: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22291

Venue: Gaia, Lecture Theatre 2 (Level 2)

In-person Registration: Click here

Livestreaming on YouTube: Click here