Art and Geopolitical Borders

Art and Geopolitical Borders: contested sovereignty and
art practice

One day symposium, Manchester School of Art, PLEASE NOTE NEW DATE Friday 20 November 2015

In recent years there has been a growth in interest in the ways that art practice can both acknowledge and articulate the issues around geo-political borders. Borders have long functioned as a vital component of state-formation and nation building, a role that continues within the shifting politics of globalisation. Their significance is thus subject to ongoing redefinition through a dynamic between a repressive politics of containment and attempts to challenge this. Within these zones of contestation, relationships between geographies and power become both clearly visible and subject to dispute. And although this functions on one level in terms of collective experience, the effects on individuals can also be destructive and traumatic.

Recently there has been an upsurge in art practices that visualise the tensions and contradictions arising from contemporary borders. However art can also function as a means of disruption and intervention within the established operations and normative meanings of border technologies, and as a site of reparation, where traumatic histories can be negotiated in turn. This one day symposium attempts to address these and related issues.

Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• Mapping borders
• Trans-border cultures
• Gender politics and borders
• Trauma and memory
• The political contestation/vacillation of borders
• Border fortification
• Migration, bodies, and borders
• Conflict sites around borders
• Curatorship of border tourism and conflict tourism

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography to one of the organising panel: Fionna Barber f.barber@mmu.ac.uk; Simon Faulkner s.faulkner@mmu.ac.uk; Beccy Kennedy b.m.kennedy@mmu.ac.uk by 1 July 2015

Selected papers from the symposium will be published in an edited collection.