13:00-15:00
University of Cambridge, Churchill College
PhD fellow Anna Sejbæk Torp-Pedersen and postdoctoral fellow Marta Wódz convene the session Mapping Human and Non-Human Migration in Contemporary Art at the Association for Art History Conference 2026.
Maps have historically been used to delineate borders, yet artists return to maps to imagine, probe, and redraw border crossings. We consider art historical inquiries on artists’ works which utilize actual geographical maps or gestures at mapping as retracing movement.
Numerous artists use mapping strategies when they undertake historical and/or activist research on entangled histories of human and non-human migrations. In her project Seeds of Change (1999-ongoing) Maria-Tereza Alves traces the circulation of seeds in ships’ ballast showing how plants persistently “fail to respect national borders” (Fisher 2013). In Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008-2011), migrants trace their journeys with permanent markers on generic maps and redraw the territory. Artists demonstrate how movement is political and mapping is too; they show histories constructed not only around nation-states and stable communities, but also around those that move. The emergence of a variety of artistic media, methodologies, and approaches to histories of migration should be reflected in art history.
Amid global heating, we can only anticipate more people, animals, and plants on the move as climate migrants (Shah, 2020). As images are major narrators of migration, there is a growing urgency to engage with this topic also in art history. Therefore, we invite papers that address the right to move: papers which critically question mapping and maps of movement; and papers which consider the interdependencies between the migration of humans and non-humans. In this panel, papers are followed by a discussion which investigates human and non-human movement in Contemporary Art.
