‘The aesthetic dimension of the social experience of migration has not been studied in its own right’ writes artist and cultural theorist Mieke Bal in the original proposal for the research theme of an international exhibition of contemporary artists titled Migratory Aesthetics – the aesthetics of cultural movement and the movement of aesthetics.

Migratory Aesthetics is the topic of a two-part, two-site international collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and the University of Leeds’ AHRC centre for cultural analysis, theory and history in a network of 30 scholars and artists.

Some contemporary art inspires ridicule from the public as it seems fanciful or self-indulgent, just a lot of metropolitan spin. Much art, however, is deeply engaged with the major traumas, tragedies and experiences of our time, unable to turn its face away from making art of the utmost seriousness, bound in honour to look history in the face, to remain faithful even to painful memory and to use art practice as moment of re-encounter and as a moment of transformation. Several artworks in this exhibition also track and celebrate the creative aspects of movement facilitated by trade and colonial connections that opened routes of wandering and unexpected exchange that often fall beneath the threshold of official histories.

Migratory Aesthetics has been curated by AHRC Centre CATH’s Director, art historian and cultural theorist Griselda Pollock. The show presents eleven artists who work with a variety of media. Both painting and drawing are back in view, taking their place beside still photography, collage and film-video projections that themselves reveal the painterly interests of the film-makers, and the connections between those working with still and time-based media, itself already a migratory form of connection, narration and transformation.

The artists selected are concerned to bring into visibility the subjective dimensions of movement and arrival, displacement and location, being at home and being away, memory with its burdens of loss and consolations of remembrance and recreation, many of which are formulated in relation to the major forces in migration: the legacy of Shoah ( Holocaust) and all its ramifications internationally and the continuing legacies of colonialism that shapes the cultures of the inter-relating postcolonial worlds. This exhibition brings post-genocidal and post-colonial and well as anti-fascist aesthetics into conversation.

Three themes run through the exhibition:

• the aesthetics of the everyday ( food, clothing, sounds, music, signs, words, holidays, letters, family albums, postcards,) that become signs we can read to track the experiences and transformations of migration, exile, relocation, and the transmission of memories, pain, stories and contestation down generations;
• the aesthetics of the transformation of ideas and intellectual traditions when they migrate with peoples forced to change location;
• the aesthetics of difference, of otherness that can either be held at a distance as foreign, alien, invasive, or embraced as transformative, necessary, invigorating and productive.

There is also a register in the aesthetics of film, writing, and mark-making of a certain violence associated with the migratory, sometimes that of a rupture and a loss involved in exile, displacement or movement into a new and unfamiliar culture, sometimes associated with political conflict such as Partition in India or apartheid in South Africa, or the decolonising liberation struggles such as the Algerian War. How are the dialectics of violence and rupture, and continuity and reconnection registered and worked through by the aesthetic processes of the artists and the experience of viewers? How are the traumas that lie behind the movement and migrations to be processed and reworked as memory? Does this make us ask about what we understand the aesthetic experience to be as something more than traditional ideas about beautiful objects and pleasure in looking.

How does art now face up to history? What are its ethical responsibilities – presented to each viewer through the singular voice of the artists shaped by varied generations and geographies?

This exhibition is thus both an exploration of the way leading contemporary postcolonial and diasporic artists explore their own historical situations in a migratory world and an exploration of the role of aesthetic practices in helping us to engage with the challenging questions and experiences created for us all by recent histories that set so many peoples in motion and remapped world space as diasporic and postcolonial.

All the artists exhibiting here have international recognition for their projects. Some have had special relations with Leeds over the years. We are honoured to present exhibition and its related screenings of related works that make a decisive contribution to showing how artistic practice is part of the highest and most ethically undertaken research into major issues of our time.

The artists are:

Martine Attille, a film maker belonging to the important film group Sankofa that emerged in the 1980s. is represented here by her meditation of memory and migration, Dreaming Rivers. The film is a poetic elegy for a mother’s life reviewed by her three children, each one with a different relation to the island and to Britain, their generational differences allowing each to recalibrate notions of their own cultural identities as well as family location and understanding of the memory embodied in a mother – a figure both familiar and enigmatic.

Mieke Bal, better known as one of the world’s leading cultural theorists has turned to film and video making. She offers here a four part video installation listening to the voices of mothers who lost their children to migration.

Sutapa Biswas, alumni of Leeds Fine Art, shows a film installation shot in the walled garden of Harewood House that functions as a beautiful but painful farewell to a beloved father, an Indian political dissident and political refugee. Deeply engaged with reworking an expanded heritage from British and European painting and from India, the work is a deep meditation on loss.

Bracha Ettinger, child of Holocaust survivors is present with some of her series of paintings titled Eurydice: the figure of her generation, she says, for she stands between two deaths. Ettinger ponders the transmission of trauma from generation to generation and the role of a specifically matrixial painting and gazing that offers a means of moving beyond the traumatic stasis of the past.

Lubaina Himid was born in Zanzibar between Africa and Britain. Her work has been a long reflection on and creative intervention in remaking the shattered histories of African peoples while rediscovering the idioms and rhetorics of African textiles, colour and different geographies of meaning. Her work is about cloths made and worn by women in East African that included aphoristic texts continuing her use of textiles to find lost historical links between British industrial workers and African women.

Isaac Julien Turner Prize nominated film maker has been one of the most powerful artistic voices in Britain since the 1970s. His film on and with Frantz Fanon both recreates the subjective history of the great theorist of decolonisation and freedom fighter and critically examines the gender and sexual politics of his moment and predicament,

Lily Markiewicz, born In Germany of Holocaust survivors who migrated to Germany after the war to revive Jewish life, shows her film Keeper of Accounts one of her many works that track the play of unspoken traumas through allusive and deeply affecting image and sound

Fanozi ‘Chickenman’ Mhkize, the only artist no longer living, was South African, making work from the found objects in an apartheid-segregated country that finally moved, into a new era, he never lived long enough to enjoy the recognition the New South Africa gave his corrosive street sign colloquial.

Roger Palmer, newly appointed Professor of Fine Art at Leeds, exhibiting at Leeds for the first time, is an internationally renowned photographer whose work explores the colonial and postcolonial landscape.

Ingrid Pollard, from a Guyanese family, based in London, uses photography as a means to explore relations between places in her series Oceans Apart, marking the space of what Paul Gilroy called ‘the Black Atlantic’ that lies between. She also explores landscape through photography, placing black subjects in the heartlands of Englishness in her work on Wordsworth’s locales in the Lake District to make visible relations, fantasies and claims on places that inscribe black histories and desires.

Judith Tucker, child of a German-Jewish refugee is a painter here turning to drawings triggered by family album photographs about the spaces of leisure, holiday resorts that were once enjoyed and then forbidden to her mother as a child. Returning to these lost places with sketchpad, Judith Tucker both travels to and takes a place in these places made mythic by faded photographs to seek a visual language for loss, memory, displacement and the impossibility of reconnecting to places marked by invisible but traumatic violence.

This exhibition for the first time links artists working on migrations and its memories and losses created through genocidal racist persecution with artists re-envisioning colonial and postcolonial movements in Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia. Finding unexpected common threads that repattern the texture of our understanding of different minorities this exhibition confirms the work of artists deeply and ethically engaged with legacies of histories of migration and the challenge of contemporary aesthetics to meet them.

THE EXHIBITION’S OFFICIAL OPENING IS 25 JANUARY. Reviewers are invited to come to see the exhibition any time after January 12, noting that Isaac Julien’s film Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask will only be screened on 11-13 January and 25 January 2006.

Following the official opening, the University gallery will be open Monday-Friday 10-5pm

Further information from Griselda Pollock 0771 025 4333 (not between 14-18 January – 0113 343 1629)