Learning Diaspora
What happens when diaspora enters art education? How do we choose words and concepts to adequately translate lived experiences of migration, exile, and displacement? What are the effects of institutionalising and ‘departmentalising’ multifaceted diasporic histories and aesthetics? How do we choose methods that might grasp messy, entangled, complex diasporic realities? What enters a diasporic bibliography or curriculum, and what remains unsaid? How can the students’ personal experiences of diasporic belonging become part of – without being absorbed into – a formalised teaching-and-learning process?
This panel invites three researchers and educators specialising in different fields of art and culture and affiliated with different institutions to share their modes of working, thinking and sharing while navigating diaspora.
(Columbia University, PhD) is professor of Diaspora Aesthetics at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. A historian and critic, she specialises in modern and contemporary art with a focus on conditions of migration, exile, diaspora, border regimes and statelessness from 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.
has been professor of Dance Studies and Performance at the Institute of Theatre Studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich since October 2024. In her research, Diagne investigates the intertwining of theory and practice, develops questions regarding subaltern perspectives and practices, and is dedicated to the procedures of diasporic writing. From this perspective, she accompanies projects by freelance artists and collaborations with institutions.
is an assistant professor at the Art x Science School for Transformation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research and teaching focus on the political ecology of transformation processes, emphasising, in particular, the material entanglements of infrastructures and bio/geo-chemical materials and how they mediate and direct historical (in)justice or change.
In English