Page - 92 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

92 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Lora Sariaslan | The Art of Migration Introduction “Migration is a historical as well as a trans-historical concept: transhistorical in the sense that people and cultural forms have always migrated; historical in the sense that the character of migration has changed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While the term migration refers to population movements either within nation states or across their borders, modern mi- gration movements are more complex and diverse.”1 The art world boasts of many ‘immigrant’ artists, now traveling and working between the West and the non-West, North, and South. They are now attaining a completely new status as world travelers, carrying out a veritable ex- change between cultures and peoples.2 I would like to suggest a new way of thinking about the immigration experience: not as a fixed and static point or a landing, but rather as a dynamic trajectory. Commencing in a ‘someplace’ of origin (in this case, Turkey) and eventually leading to a city in another country, via the ‘arrival city’ with its economic, educational, political, and cultural life, this dotted line is a tangible reality in the minds and lives of most immigrants. Transitoriness is frequently defined as a state antithetical to belonging: between stable states and homes. One of the aspects of globalization has been the identification of a new social group expanding constantly. In a country such as Turkey, the fluidity of borders – geographic, psycho- logical, and symbolic – is graven into the national consciousness. As the focused selection of artists in this article attests, the common thread that binds contemporary artists originally from Turkey (active in Turkey or elsewhere) is a state of being that encompasses many voices and multiple places, and an understanding that home is a zone that we actively create which can be later remade, and remade again. This article explores mobility and migration from Turkey to Europe and its role in the making of trans-and international identities. It specifically investigates the articulation and dynamics of hyphenated European-Turkish identities, and new forms of European and dias- poric citizenship through the work and biographies of contemporary visual artists originally from Turkey who have left their ‘home’ for various reasons (migration, education, or artist residencies). What makes these artists particularly pertinent for an investigation of new forms of identity, citizenship-making, and belonging in contemporary Europe is that their art cannot exist without either Europe or Turkey. Concentrating on their art as ‘snap shots,’ this paper fo- cuses on the politics of belonging through an investigation of how these artistic trajectories are mapped in a transnational context through different cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Frank- furt, and Istanbul. The exploration of aesthetic dimensions of cultural products and works of art created by artists who engage themes such as migration, transculturation and cultural translation will be the focus of this article. This is what makes concentrating on a number of artists originally from Turkey that has emerged since the 1990s a rewarding exercise, for the reason that the artists have no choice but to engage – which may also mean through disengagement – with Tur- key and its numerous stereotypes and assumptions. The artists in focus are models of cultural pluralism: having trained in Europe, while maintaining an art practice indelibly tinged with 1 Sten Pultz Moslund, Anne Ring Petersen, and Moritz Schramm, ‘Introduction’, in Migration and Culture. Poli- tics, Aesthetics and History (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2015), 1. 2 Hanru, Hou and Gabi Scardi (editors), Wherever We Go – Art, Identity, Cultures in Transit (Milan: 5 Continents, 2008), 15.