Hat Sessions
Migrant Forms
As barbed wire and walls rise around the world, governments exclude people, whether citizens or aliens, and Fascist demagogues whip up majoritarian hatred, a tribe of artistic representations is emerging, speaking across borders, and responding to the imaginative and ethical demands of mass displacement in a way that governments, institutions, and public discourse have calamitously failed to do. These works include art about migrant reality; objects of migrant life shaped into artefacts for cultural work; and art coming out of the experience of migrancy (migrant self-expression). Join former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, early modernists Natalya Din-Kariuki Subha Mukherji, and artist Issam Kourbaj as they discuss these 'migrant forms', the processes of meaning-making they embody, and how they represent and negotiate with dispossession in a way that can also recreate exchange, agency, and even homecoming. Speaking with, not simply about migrant knowledge is the necessary, difficult task for those of us who are looking for some sort of better and more honest solidarity. This panel will offer a collective meditation on the dynamic between crossing borders and border-crossing art, as well as a call for a larger life lived together, harnessing the imaginative yield of speaking, thinking, and moving across boundaries.