To browse Academia. Identity and belonging increasingly feature as themes in the work of contemporary artists, a focus that seems particularly felt by those artists who either personally or through their families have experienced dispersal and migration. The thesis explores how fourteen Algerian and Franco-Algerian artists position themselves and are positioned by others to identity and community.
The difficult intertwined histories of Algeria and France fraught with the consequences of colonisation, the impact of migration, and, in Algeria, civil war, provides a rich terrain for the exploration of identity formation. Positionality theory is used to analyse the process of identity formation in the artists and how this developed over the course of their careers and in their art. An important part of the analysis is concerned with how the artists positioned themselves consciously or inadvertently to fixed or fluid conceptions of identity and how this was reflected in their artworks.
The thesis examines the complex politics of identity and belonging that extends beyond nationality and diaspora and implicates a range of other identifications including that of class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and career choice. Inasmuch as the events of and ushered in tremendous shifts in political consciousness across the Mashreq and Maghreb, they too increased the mass movements and migrations of humanity. That Maghrebi spheres of cultural production have sought to document and problematise these seismic transformations is undeniable.
While narratives of hardship, stagnation, and political struggles undergird most analyses of the post-revolutionary Maghreb and discourses of migration, this essay seeks instead to demonstrate how the visual strategies of contemporary artists render the traumas of dislocationboth real and metaphysicaland in turn, engender a politics and aesthetics of placelessness.
This essay probes into the placeless nature of not only the artists' liminal operations but also explores the conceptual methods through which the tensions of migrancy are manifest. Yet, the question remains: How does the trope of the border inform the creative expressions of not only entrapment, but endless mobility?
