Art, refugeedom and the aesthetic encounter

Refugeedom and its various politicisations, as a complex human experience of political alterity, poses unique challenges for the visual aesthetics of refugee subjecthoods and subjectivities. In contrast to media and humanitarian visualities, aesthetic engagement with what is contentiously referred to as ‘refugee art’ might have the potential to create more complex possibilities and open new subjective spaces by enabling a different epistemic access to the experiences of refugeedom's constituted subjects. We turn to Jacques Rancière's theoretical frame as we focus attention on the aesthetic encounter, or the affective and sensory experience of what an artwork does. Looking closely at six artworks focused on the recent Syrian ‘refugee crisis’, we ask: What might we perceive differently of forced displacement in the aesthetic encounter that we might not otherwise see in activist or politicised spaces, or in everyday visual representations of forced displacement? Whether by reinscribing real-world subject positions or transcending them, the aesthetic experience can open up a rift – even if momentary – in ordinary ways of seeing and perceiving refugeedom. In other words, the aesthetic experience expands our moral imagination by staging occasions for creating scenes of relationality with political alterity that do not exist or that have not been previously imagined.