Beyond Boundaries of Space and Time: Transmigrations in contemporary art

This paper focuses on the dislodging of hegemonic narratives of culture and identity through formations of contemporary art that are spatially and temporally located in a field of uneven material and immaterial flows. This is a position that prompts an exploration of emerging issues in context of conditions of global mobility. In building an argument for an expanded art theory, I draw from a diverse range of artists, curators, critics and theorists to investigate the global networks of relationships influencing discourses of contemporary art and its technologies of production and dissemination. Analysis of art objects and/or events informed by transmigration involves articulating the ways in which they displace and contest established discourses and hegemonic narratives without using, in the process, an alternative narrative which is in itself exclusive and bounded. Such art objects and/or events exceed and surpass any single code, central ideology or static system. The complexity of contemporary art informed by conditions of transmigration is grounded in an in-between space between and across different borders. In the global context, with its transnational networks and transmigration of ideas and people, contemporary art has become so highly multifaceted and mobile that it challenges established definitions, crosses boundaries and calls for new ways of understanding the multiplicities of space, time and potential.