The Borders of Art

The Borders of Art is structured in three sections, each addressing these questions on a different scale. Contributions in the first section, "Artistic Interventions in Geopolitical Reimaginings," focus on individual artists whose work interrogates assumptions around refugees, migration, and border crossings across a range of geopolitical locales and political contexts. The second section, "Possibilities and Limitations of Exhibitions and Institutions," questions the assumption that curatorial practices offer viable alternatives to restrictive global realities. These case studies, instead, highlight the complicity of institutional infrastructures and bureaucracies, themselves governed by the logic and limitations of imperial geographies. The final section, "Art as Activism, Activism as Art," offers a series of essays and conversations on the tensions inherent in projects and collectives that move between exhibition spaces and a desire to affect legal change regarding human rights violations. Interspersed throughout the three sections are newly commissioned artistic interventions that engage with discourses around refugees and migration. Taken together, examples from the US-Mexico border to upstate New York, refugee camps in Kosovo, Palestine, and Denmark, and varied Mediterranean crossings illustrate the organizing logic and violence of a globalized border regime.