Unsettled: Narrative Strategies in Exhibitions About the ‘Refugee Crisis’

This chapter analyses four (video) installations exhibited at the Venice Art Biennale, three in 2017 and one in 2019. Taking as its basis visual communications scholar Balca Arda’s identification of two prevalent types of artworks representing the global refugee situation, ‘human condition assessment’ artworks and ‘agency empowerment’ artworks, the chapter proposes a third, more subversive curatorial strategy. One that shifts emphasis from the people on the move to their reception in their various host countries and the colonial legacies and discourses of national sovereignty that led to the situation in the first place, and which characterize its victims’ experiences. The four works use various kinds of narrative strategy: fake documentary in George Drivas’s Laboratory of Dilemmas; colonial mimicry with a twist in Mohau Modisakeng’s Passage; a self-conscious re-packaging of refugees’ stories in Candice Breitz’s Love Story; and, finally, an unmarked artefact, which completely collapses the very possibility of narrative in Christoph Büchel’s Barca Nostra.