The Temporality of “Awareness-raising” Memorials and the Making of the "Always-Already Lost"

• In Event: The Body, Memorial Culture and Alan Kurdi

Abstract

This article considers contemporary public art representations of displacement looking at how three artworks produced since the summer of 2015, to “raise-awareness” of the crisis of forced migration and the deaths that resulted from it, function to constitute both their audiences and the refugees on whose behalf they claim to speak: Ai Weiwei’s re-enactment of the image of drowned Syrian-Kurdish toddler and subsequent installation of 14000 life jackets on the façade of the Konzerthaus in Berlin, and Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculpture installation off the coast of Spain, The Raft of the Lampedusa. Situated at the intersection of feminist critiques of humanitarian visualities and visual/cultural studies, and owing much to theories of biopolitics, of memorials, this paper argues that as international artworks that memorialize in “real-time”, these projects, work, often in opposition with their stated intentions, to silence voices of displacement.

Author

• Danyel Ferrari, Rutgers SC&I