‘Refugees Welcome’. Photo: Marcia Chandra. All rights reserved.What is the role of the gallery or museum in responding to the most urgent and pressing social and political crises of our time? Is it, as Okwui Enwezor, Director of Haus der Kunst suggests, about the power to ‘make things visible’ or does it have an even more active and critical role to play? In the digital exhibition ‘Crossing Borders’ – created in response to the blocking of certain immigrant groups into the US – MOMA presents the work of refugee artists who have migrated to the US over the past 100 years. The history of modern art, the museum proposes, is itself a "history of global turmoil, migration and transnational exchange". Yet the curator’s notes on the pieces selected says little about these artists as the displaced other than to tell us where they came from and the kind of art they make.
One visitor, a proud Brexiteer, tells Mripa it is not ‘cultured and intelligent’ migrants like her who concern him.
In selecting artists who deliberately engage with issues of migration and the uprooted and displaced, 'Who Are We?' invites a more active and critical dialogue. In placing itself in Tate Modern, albeit on the 5th Floor of the new Tate Exchange space it also opens up the possibility of challenging the institution itself and the impossibility of remaining ‘neutral’ in these troubled times.
