Art, Borders and Belonging

Maria Photiou is an Art Historian and a Research Fellow at the University of Derby, UK. Her research focuses on women’s art practices and the connections between migration, gender, memory and the politics of belonging.Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History & Theory at Loughborough University, UK. Her current research is particularly engaged with connections between transnational feminisms, contemporary art and the environmental humanities.

• List of FiguresList of ContributorsIntroduction: Art, Borders and Belonging: On Home and Migration, Maria Photiou (University of Derby, UK) and Marsha Meskimmon (Loughborough University, UK)1. Weaving Together: Narratives of Home, Exile and Belonging, Maria Photiou (University of Derby, UK)2. Parastou Forouhar: Materialising Pain and Beauty, Lydia Wooldridge (Bristol School of Art and University of the West of England, UK)3. Deciphering Home Through Hajra Waheed’s Archival Investigations, Sarah Fox (Carleton University, Canada)4. Re-creating the Place of Home in Remedios Varo’s La creación de las aves, Nadia Garcia (University College Cork, Ireland)5. Identity and (Not) Belonging: Art and the Politics of British-ness in 1980s Britain, Imogen Racz (Coventry University, UK)6. Aftershocks and (Un)belongings: Reflecting on Home Strike, Alexandra Kokoli (Middlesex University London, UK) and Basia Sliwinska (University of the Arts London, UK)7. Crossing literal and conceptual borders: Nepantla practices of the borderlands in performance projects by Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Eva Zetterman (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)8. Boundaries and belonging in Kazakh art: a case study of Red Butterfly by Almagul Menlibayeva, Aliya de Tiesenhausen (Independent Scholar, UK)9. 'Arrival city' versus 'dysfunctional nation': Exhibiting the 'migration crisis' at the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale, Joel Robinson (The Open University, UK)BibliographyIndex

This is a wonderfully curated collection of essays. The range of artistic material is rich, and the thematic focus on art’s unique potential to weave together experiences of migration, borders, homemaking and belonging is remarkably consistent, as is the authors’ innovative use of feminist and transnational perspectives to foreground female artists and engage with their works in close readings that are both intimate and trenchant.