This course explores the ways recent cinematic and artistic works engage Europe’s increasingly diverse and complex relationship to migration. We will examine various types of films, videos, and cinematic installations that concern migratory networks, infrastructures, and places across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. With a specific focus on diverse forms of im/mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, undocumented migration, refugee mobilities, and tourism, we will study the work of established filmmakers such as Abdellatif Kechiche, Ayşe Polat, Fatih Akin, Michael Haneke, Stephen Frears, Michael Winterbottom, and Tony Gatlif as well as video essays and installations of artists such as Hito Steyerl, Kutluğ Ataman, Otolith Group, Isaac Julien, Ursula Biemann, Angela Melitopoulos, Lisa Parks, Steve McQueen, Maria Iorioand Raphaël Cuomo, Harun Farocki, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, and Ergin Çavuşoğlu. Joining formal questions of aesthetic experimentation to sociopolitical concerns, we will draw on theories of migrant and diasporic cinema, projected image art, and mobility studies to perform historically situated close readings of films and artworks. Moreover, by employing a range of theoretical discourses in film studies and contemporary art, students will develop an understanding of diverse ways of thinking and writing critically about the forms of the moving image that blur the distinctions between the cinema and the gallery. This class aims to survey and analyze selected pockets of international contemporary artistic practices, while attending to key theoretical texts and debates that inform them. Topics discussed may include, but not be limited to: the post-medium condition, refusal and the “non-productive attitude,” appropriation, historical referentialism, networked art, and sincerity. Throughout the course, we will keep an eye on relationship between current economic and political forms and contemporary art. This 300-level seminar will be reading and presentation intensive, and is meant to be intellectually challenging and rigorous. Oral presentations and short written response papers based on readings, image presentations of individual artists, and a longer, theoretically-based writing assignment will be required. The course is open to students working in all forms and disciplines.

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