How has statelessness shaped art in the 20th and 21st centuries? Join Dr Banai as she considers the artistic, visual, and textual representations of statelessness, the practices of stateless artists, and how our understanding of statelessness and history are intertwined.

About the speaker

Dr Noit Banai is the University Professor of Diaspora Aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is an art historian and critic who specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on conditions of migration, exile, diaspora, border-regimes, and statelessness in a trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary perspective.

Her current project, Stateless: Artistic Practices by Refugees in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, 1933-1953, concerns the experience of statelessness as it was visually documented by European Jewish refugees who fled to these cities as well as by internally displaced indigenous communities, and Baghdadi, Persian, and Russian populations, that had been residing in East and Southeast Asia since the mid-19th and early 20th century.

Supported by the Macgeorge Bequest.

Enquiries

Please send your enquiries to arts-engage@unimelb.edu.au