Understanding Displacement Aesthetics and Creating Change in the Art Gallery for Refugees, Migrants and Host Communities

There are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people in the world today (UNHCR Global Trends in Forced Displacement, 2018). Refugees, migrants and asylum seekers are at the forefront of international politics as populations defined by 'crisis', while the UN and humanitarian agencies attempt to bridge gaps in national policies on aid and resettlement. Visual and craft artists have played an historically important yet lesser-studied role in UN and humanitarian welfare programmes, in art therapy, and in communicating human rights.

However, refugees and migrants can also be represented as nameless human flows and passive recipients of aid, which may strain both refugee and host communities. Significantly, the art industry and art galleries encounter parallel problems in aestheticizing the experience of people affected by war and displacement. While art asserts a powerful role in challenging hostile representations of refugees and migrants, in reality opportunities for refugee artists and curators in mainstream gallery culture, and opportunities for interpersonal dialogue and intercultural exchange with host communities remain limited.

Understanding Displacement Aesthetics proposes a timely reappraisal of this field of vision by historicising the humanitarian aspirations of art and craft, and analysing the impact of artistic responses to displacement and refugees. It investigates how 'displacement aesthetics' emerged after 1945 in both the practice and exhibition of art and craft, UN-sponsored welfare programmes in Europe and Palestine, and international art museums.

The research seeks to understand the relationship between the uses and practice of art, the influence of and resistance to cultural stereotypes, art's interplay with humanitarian sentiment and action, and the political categorisation of refugees and migrants. Seeking to understand and utilise this history, the project identifies how displacement aesthetics continues to operate in the current refugee crisis in the international art world and in grass-roots artistic initiatives in Greece, Palestine, Australia and the UK.

Crucially, this project seeks to move beyond a focus on tropes, by amplifying how art practices can enhance the potential and resilience of refugee communities.

The ambition of the project is, therefore, to transform displacement aesthetics by bringing together academics, artists, curators from migrant and refugee backgrounds together with the internationally renowned arts NGO In Place of War, and two leading art galleries in the UK, Manchester Art Gallery (MAG) and the Whitworth Art Gallery (WAG). The research addresses the ambitions of creative artists and curators, who, as migrants and refugees, face particular career barriers, and yet can be obliged to focus their practice on their outsider identity.

A programme of inclusive, co-designed art projects will facilitate art-making, participatory exhibitions, and create a community 'welcome space' as a permanent infrastructural change in Manchester Art Gallery. These projects will generate research data to evaluate how effectively art museums can support refugee/migrant artists and communities and build solidarity across communities.

The project is led by a team of experienced scholars in the cultural history of war and displacement (PI), art history and contemporary art (CI), cultural theory and resilience studies (RF), and participatory art methods (team). Distinctively, these senior academics are also experienced curators, and the CI is also a practising artist, who will co-design the impact projects in partnership with MAG, WAG and the NGO In Place of War in collaboration with local participants in Manchester.

This is an exceptional opportunity to catalyse the history of displacement aesthetics and make sustainable changes that benefit local communities, while advancing approaches to collecting, curating and representing art.