Being a Border: Workshop with Professor Noit Banai

Noit Banai (Columbia University, PhD) is Professor of Diaspora Aesthetics at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. An historian and critic, she specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on conditions of migration, exile, diaspora, border-regimes and statelessness in a trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary perspective. Her current book project is titled Stateless: Artistic Practices by Refugees in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, 1933-1953. She is also the author of Yves Klein (Reaktion Books, 2014), Being a Border (Paper Visual Arts, 2021) and many articles and exhibition reviews in international journals.

This workshop begins from the premise that the simultaneous redistribution and retrenchment of borders is one of the most significant issues in contemporary artistic practices, theories, histories, and methodologies. The centrality of this issue is linked to the emergence and legitimation of the nation state as the central organizing principle around which the ‘people' have been produced within modernity/coloniality and around which the contestation for power and representation continues in our neoliberal global present. Approaching borders as both structural and subjective, the discussion will foreground their visual, material, and discursive articulation and negotiation in diverse geographic, sociopolitical and ideological contexts and institutional frameworks and consider how their situatedness/positionality might create the conditions of possibility for trans-national and post-national notions of belonging.

This is an interdisciplinary, discussion-based workshop for staff and PGR students. A light lunch will be provided for participants. It is supported by the School of Art History, the St Andrews Centre for Contemporary Art, the Centre for Art & Politics, and the Centre for the Critical Reimagining of Human Rights.

Image Credit: Bouchra Khalili. The Mapping Journey Project. 2008–11. Video still. © Bouchra Khalili. Courtesy of the artist.