Post-migrant Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture

20 August 2016

Moritz Schramm, Associate Professor and Researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, Department for the Study of Culture.
In connection with the exhibition Your Danish is Good

Post-migration is referred to as a shift in which cultural producers are looking beyond established and two-dimensional definitions of migrant identity politics. These are usually driven by binary positions, such as native versus foreign, or ‘us’ versus ‘them’, or between self and the other. The post-migrant spectrum proposes that the diversity of backgrounds, lifestyles, and ethnicities is a norm, rather than an exception. A condition where artists, seeking creative transformation and individual recognition, could explore possible third spaces for fomenting new perspectives. More importantly, where their backgrounds engage and refine beyond the political and cultural ties given by their communities of origin and their host countries.

Post-migration looks to a range of questions regarding the state of nativist politics and culture, with the potential to revise art histories linking modernism and migration i.e. Kandinsky (Russian, later French) or Marcel Duchamp (French, became a U.S. citizen in 1955), to opening new alternative readings for the contributions and positions taken today by contemporary post-migrant art production, in addition to gaining agency over and diverting prevalent processes of Othering in the future.

The talk also served as an introduction to the research Moritz Schramm is currently leading through the collaborative research program 'Art, Culture and Politics in the ‘Postmigrant Condition'', conducted from the University of Southern Denmark, and which is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research.