Book - Terra Infirma Irit Rogoff

In an age of 'ethnic cleansing' and forced migration, of contested borders and nations in turmoil, how have issues of place and identity, and of belonging and exclusion, been represented in visual culture? In Terra Infirma , Irit Rogoff examines geography's truth claims and signifying practices, arguing that geography is a language in crisis, unable to represent the immense changes that have taken place in a post-colonial, post-communist, post-migratory world. She uses the work of international contemporary artists to explore how art in the twentieth century has confronted and challenged issues of identity and belonging.



Rogoff's dazzling and richly-illustrated study takes in painting, installation art, film and video by a wide range of artists including Charlotte Salomon, Ana Mendieta, Joshua Neustein, Yehoshua Glotman, Mona Hatoum, Hans Haacke, Ashley Bickerton, Alfredo Jaar and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Structuring her argument through themes of luggage, mapping, borders and bodies, Rogoff explores how artists have confronted twentieth century phenomena such as the horror of the Holocaust, the experience of diaspora at New York's Ellis Island, and, in the present day, disputed and fraught boundaries in the Middle East, the two Germanies, the Balkan states and the US-Mexican border.

Ursula Biemann’s projects on politics of geography and mobility

Ursula Biemann is an artist, theorist and curator who has in recent years produced a considerable body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. In a series of internationally exhibited video projects, as well as in several books (”Been There and Back to Nowhere” (2000), “Geography and the Politics of Mobility” (2003)) which are often related to the video projects, she has focused on the gendered dimension of migrant labour from smuggling on the Spanish-Moroccan border to migrant sex workers moving from the East to the West.



Insisting that location is spatially produced rather than pre-determined by governance, she made space and mobility her prime category of analysis in the curatorial project “Geography and the Politics of Mobility” (2003), the recent art research projects “The Black Sea Files” on the Caspian oil politics, or the Maghreb Project on Mediterranean mobility (2006).
In these later projects she focuses on how locations and geographies get transformed at a time when subjects are no longer bound to one particular place.