| dc.description.abstract | Europe is facing nowadays one of the largest migration waves, one it has not faced since the second world war.
Between 2015-2017 more than million asylum seekers arrived in the continent, in search of a safer place to
live. The framing of this migration as a crisis for Europe is based not only on the acuteness and intensity of
this movement but on the 'Otherness' of the migrants, as they originate mainly from Muslim majority regions
in the Middle East and Africa. They are often depicted as a threat to the physical security, economy and
cultural identity of their hosts by mainstream media channels.
Here I examined the ways migrants and Asylum seekers coming to Europe in the recent ‘crisis’ are portrayed
and depicted in contemporary Western art by selecting and discussing five artworks as case studies; Three
installations by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, Invisible Cities, Architecture of Exodus by Italian artist Marco
Tiberio, Villa de Calais by Henk Wildschut, The Average Face by Dutch artist Jeroen van der Most and
Where Children Sleep by Swedish artist Magnus Wennman.
Using visual and critical analysis as a research method, this study investigated how asylum seekers and
migrants are presented as a group and as individuals in contemporary artworks and compared to the current
depiction of asylum seekers in the European media. To address the concept of the migrant “Other” in the eye
of the European “us” in the context of artistic and media representation I further employed the framework of
postcolonial paradigm from the field of cultural studies. This discourse enabled a critical reading of the
political and cultural power relations that are reflected and projected from the works. The study revealed a
complex image of the way artists refer to the migration crisis. The act of choosing an object of the artwork,
hence making the selected object the center of discussion, does not necessarily change the way the object is
viewed.
The role of artists in society is debatable and controversial, but one of the common perceptions is that artists
try to undermine status quo, to question popular assumptions, alternate images and create a new perspective.
However, as I show here most of the contemporary artworks merely duplicate of the image of the media,
calling for a sincere examination of the artists' fulfillment of their humanistic role in the face of this migration
challenge. | |
