I was invited, as a programmer of an arts festival, to contribute to the project Living on a Border with a paper on art and migration. As the Living on a Border project focuses on migration and also includes its phenomena within the EU, I shall in my paper mainly reflect on the migration from periphery to the centre, more precisely, on how ‘peripheral' artists are represented in the ‘centre'. Even though not all peripheral artists are de facto migrants, such a comparison seems adequate for several reasons. First, Western art institutions, biennales, and fairs doubtlessly still define the centre of the ‘international' art market, which is why artists coming from the periphery of the Western world - such as Eastern Europe, or so-called third countries - are constructed as migrants. They need to travel to the centre in order to make ‘an international' career. However, spatial travel is not the only trait which allows us to draw a parallel between peripheral artists and migrants. As I will later argue, peripheral artists are similar to migrants in a way to play a role of mimicry (Homi Bhabha), they are to be a site of double articulation: belonging to the periphery but acquainted with and playing by the rules of the centre. Furthermore, ‘artist' and ‘migrant, when understood as cultural signs, are believed to share a common structure: both are believed to be translational and transnational. Both artist (here not only peripheral artist) and migrant embody the capacity of translating personal, social, and political experience, and both artist and migrant are believed to function in a way which transcends national borders. In the contemporary art system an artist (especially a peripheral artist) who doesn't to a large extent represent qualities of a migrant - heteroglossia, flexibility, mobility, the ability to translate local to global and (important!) nevertheless represent (cultural, ethnic, in some instances also national) difference is not likely to be interesting for the international art market.  "An artist who cannot speak English is no artist," artist Mladen Stilinović once commented.

 

Even though art as a sign system and art as a socioeconomic system are indeed in many aspects transnational, there are still many ties between art and national, especially when looking at the representation of peripheral or migrant artists. However, I should not hesitate to introduce a disclaimer: the ties between art, peripheral/migrant and national are in most instances ideologically and institutionally constructed. My intention is not to linger upon the question of to what extent national borders can overlap with cultural borders; in the context where I live and work, national is understood as narrowly as possible - as the tracing and counting of blood cells as writer Dubravka Ugrešić puts it - so such treaties don't really make sense without an exhaustive deconstruction of the notion national. In addition, I am not interested in again repeating the story of genealogy of (national) subject and the story of (national) subjectivisation, respectively. What I am interested in is a reflection on how peripheral artists, constructed to a large extent as migrant artists, are represented in the centre of the contemporary art system. What I argue is that being ‘peripheral and migrant' within the art system has been represented and appropriated in a way that deprives it of much of its transnational and translational capacity. A thesis too hard - a deliberate hyperbolic stance in order to re-claim the distinction between art and politics. Not in a sense that art is not or should not be political - not at all, but that art is not enough, and cannot be enough, especially in the contemporary situation. What art can do, though, is work on inventing new, more just, models of representation.

 

Since the emergence of postcolonial theory which introduced to contemporary humanist discourse critical self-reflection when thinking the (ethnic, racial, and national) difference and subaltern subject, diasporic, migrant and displaced are believed to be able to teach critical thinking and art new important lessons as well as to add importantly to direct social action movements. The impulse of the postcolonial and gender critique has resonated within the political, social, as well as art, agenda, however it has been translated to all of these realms by way of multiculturalism, which left the kernel of the problems - for example, how to claim agency from the margins of a nationally regulated political and economic reality - rather untouched. Many representation strategies of the subaltern and migrant both within political and social reality and within art system have been developed.

 

For example, in the city where I spent four years during my postgraduate studies, one third of the city population is migrant and doesn't possess German citizenship. In this way, these migrants are not able to participate in local and national elections. However, in order for migrants to be represented in the city council, a special council for foreigners as well as a parallel mayor for foreigners have been established; both the council and the mayor are elected in special elections and can comment on issues relating to integration and the lives of migrants. However, the foreign mayor, as well as the foreign council, only has a commentarial function regarding issues related to policy regulating the lives of migrants, as well as when ‘general' issues which would influence the lives of migrants are at stake. At the last local elections that took place in 2008, citizens of the EU countries were able to participate in the general local elections, while migrants-citizens of non-EU states, which comprise the majority of the foreign population, still couldn't vote in the general elections. Such representation models have an obvious deficiency: the representative bodies of the migrant can assert their political power only in issues concerning migrants; above all, their political power is restricted only to commentarial function.

 

Methods as how to enable the representation of peripheral/migrant, subaltern, or if you want, ‘non-Western' artists within the ‘international' art system are confronted with the same problem as the described body for political representation of migrants living in the city of Munich. The kernel of the problem articulates itself in the question: how to assure that representation of peripheral or ‘non-Western' artists can claim universality and it won't function as a kind of a ‘wild game reserve' for these artists. Working as programmer of a festival which claims positive discrimination on the ground of gender difference, I am daily confronted with this question. Nevertheless, the particular case of the festival where I work teaches me also an important lesson on the question of how authority and claiming the universal is in most instances still an entitlement of the centre and not of the margins. There are many factors which support such an assertion in the particular case of the International Festival of Contemporary Arts - City of Women. Firstly, at its beginnings and also later, the Festival was programmed by influential and respected cultural producers, who were active also in ‘non-gender' oriented art projects and art institutions. Secondly, the Festival has been regularly co-produced by one of the largest Slovene mainstream cultural institutions, Cankarjev dom. Thirdly, many of the women artists who have presented their work at the Festival gained international acclaim by institutions and biennales which, due to their status within art as a socioeconomic system, ordain universality and the utmost authority.

 

However, there are also other ways as how to claim universality, not from the centre, but from the margin. One important method is building parallel networks of grassroots projects, as in the case of the successful Lady Fest initiative or FAQ - Feminist, Activist, Queer network of Balkan gender & queer festivals and organizations, which was established last year at the suggestion of the Ljubljana-based grassroots feminist&queer festival, Red Dawns. It seems that community and civil action, in order to claim universal relevance within the (art) system, always need to be translated/articulated in some aspects to specialised subsystems which stubbornly inscribe themselves into the broader system and in this way importantly reinvent the broader system itself. Both of the examples of how gender focused art projects - one mainstream and the other grassroots - claim relevance, teach us important lessons when working with representations of migrant or subaltern artists. Public presentations of the artists, who represent the subaltern or migrant, should also develop strategies as how to include the centre ­or as how to reinvent it.

 

In the case of the centre of the art system - as stated in the introduction - the multicultural agenda has been largely adopted in way that doesn't really transcend the national. Quite the opposite - in many instances the employment of the ‘transnational' as embodied in the representation of peripheral or migrant artists even underlines the category of the national and feeds the exoticising gaze. Even if the migrant artist is supposed to transcend nationally-defined cultural borders by employing the linguistic and formal lingua franca as well as playing by the structural rules of the ‘international' art market imposed by the centre, her/his work should still mark the difference in order to satisfy the exoticising gaze. An artist coming from the periphery is supposed to apply in her work the up-to-date formal language of the ‘international' art system; however her work should enable already-known interpretations of the difference. When promoting the Bosnian duo Starke which introduces empowering texts on sexuality inspired by porno aesthetics and electro music, I was again convinced about this fact: a German organiser presented them in terms of (post)-war determinism. As Bosnia-Herzegovina is largely labelled by the war of 1990s, everything that comes out of there should in a way originate in this war. Artists from the centre (spatially, nationally, as well as culturally) do not seem to bear the weight of representing this kind of difference. However, in the case of the peripheral artist, if the exotic difference is not articulated - whether in the artwork itself, in the discourses accompanying the artwork or in the artist's biography - the artwork and its author have less a chance of satisfying the exoticising expectations and in this way can even be judged as non-authentic and as a plagiarism full of non-authentic mimicry.[1]

 

Too much ‘authenticity', however, doesn't do any good for the peripheral artist. Her/his art projects should preferably focus on issues which are high on the agenda of the imaginary of the centre about the periphery, and they should definitely employ up-to-date formal conventions, otherwise they could easily be considered aesthetically irrelevant. In addition, it is also very useful for a peripheral artist if she/he is the holder of the ‘right' passport. Providing papers to an artist to obtain a visa and guiding her/him through this exhausting procedure doesn't really suit the image of a transnational artist. An artist is expected to embody mobility, so the difficulties with obtaining a visa don't really enhance this picture. The artist Leila Čmajčanin has created a performance in which she insists that visitors of her exhibition obtain a visa issued by her on the grounds of the same criteria she had to meet when wanting to enter the centre, the EU. By checking if the visitors of her exhibition - artists, curators or aliens, she makes no difference - have enough funds, have a certified invitation, are in good health, etc., she makes visible the regulations a peripheral artist meets when trying to enter the ‘international' art market.[2]

 

The transnational as well as translational character of art and, in this way, also artists, lately so praised in the popular discourse on intercultural dialogue - which is in many instances only a new buzz word in place of the lately banished multiculti - does especially in extreme situations, like in the contemporary relations between Palestinians and Israelis, seem obsolete. At a discussion with different East-European as well as Middle-East cultural producers organised by the European Cultural Foundation early in 2008, when the Palestinian curator Jack Persekain was asked if he collaborates with Israeli artists, he answered that as long as Palestinians aren't entitled their rights he would never represent an Israeli artist, even though he collaborates with Israeli cultural producers and has even Israeli friends. Fair enough, Jack. In some instances, rejection of employing the translating power of art in a completely unequal environment, such a rejection-strategy proves to be more politically responsible.

 

My paper has been provoked by a personal experience, a memory which has been repeatedly coming back to my mind: the experience of helplessness when witnessing detentions and deportations of people without the ‘right papers'. When I was a student back in the 90s, I earned my living as a flight attendant and in this role also regularly witnessed passengers (mostly ex-Yu citizens) who had been deported back to their countries of origin. When I was a postgraduate student in Germany I travelled often from Ljubljana to Munich by train and witnessed countless times that people were taken down from the train and all I could do was to ask the officer if he could talk more nicely to these people before sending them to the misery of the asylum seekers' accommodation centre. Art simply cannot be enough if a friend of mine, in order to get a better position as a PR manager, has to change her Bosnian surname to a more Slovene-like surname (she actually did change her surname and now works under her new Slovene surname for the Slovene government ...). Art projects which deal with highly politicised issues like migration or conditions of work are important, but they can move and stimulate change only in an environment where all of the sectors of social action and also politics work hand in hand.

 

The ‘International' art market and its players should reflect their methods of representation; representing peripheral artists is one of the most urgent though not only problematic issues. However, while artists - both peripheral and central - and cultural producers are inventing projects, texts, and representation models in order to translate the issues of the lived political and social experience and to come closer to a transnational utopia, politics doesn't really seem to understand their language. The language of capital and its translational and transnational capacity seems quite more comprehensive than social justice. As a programmer of a festival which presents women artists, I am often asked if the City of Women festival has added to equal opportunities within our society. It has surely added to the representation of women artists in our local, to some extent, also international context. But to expect artworks, artists, and art events to change political and social reality, is like having a recipe and a baking tray to bake a dream cake but lacking the ingredients and an oven. Arts and theoretical discourses can raise questions, can point fingers at relevant issues, they can - as illustrated in my paper - even reflect upon the dynamics of certain social and system relations, they can broaden our ways of thinking, invent new representation models, they can even change our way of communicating and acting with each other, however, they can only accomplish the latter if heard by the ones who define our common social and political reality. As philosopher Igor Pribac recently argued in an interview for the Slovene weekly magazine Mladina, "The possibility today is more and more palpable that capital will not only get rid of democracy as a useless crutch, but of political power as such." (translation by KK)  Ethics and justice are today quite unpopular and kind of outdated words. Art, like education, is a realm which, if subjected to the profit maximising rule, will lead to even deeper geopolitical and class abysses. If subsidised by the state, by public institutions, or by socially responsible private foundations, art projects and their authors have the ethical responsibility to work towards a society of equal opportunities and justice. In the contemporary situation in which profit maximisation has become one of the highest values, the value of politics should definitely experience a re-evaluation. Art as a system should therefore reject its extreme politicisation in the situation where politics has lost its relevance.

 

 

---

[1] At a concert by the Bosnian electro-noise band in Germany, which offered few possibilities for exoticising, a German music critic complained that the sound is nothing special and could easily be made anywhere in the world. The same critic never expressed problems about, but rather welcomed, German musicians, who employ an ‘international' sound.

[2] It is true, however, that artists more easily obtain a visa than other migrants as migration policies do privilege intellectual migration above economic migration. Migration policies of contemporary democratic capitalist states make a difference between asylum seekers who immigrate because their freedom of speech has been restricted and between those whose lives have been threatened due to poverty. The Apollonic legacy within the Western societies reflects itself also in migration policies: the psyche - the intellectual - is privileged over the physical maintenance of a human life.

 

 

Katja Kobolt, PhD, is a free-lance cultural producer and publicist from Ljubljana, working currently as artistic director of the City of Women Association for Promotion of Women in Culture and researching on political implications on feminist (art) theory and cultural memory.