Marsha Meskimmon

Visuality: The New, New Art History?

Allert, Beate (ed.). Languages of Visuality: Crossings between Science, Art, Politics and Literature Stafford, Barbara. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images

Visions of the "Neue Frau" Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany

The emergence of the Neue Frau (New Woman) in Germany after the first World War was symptomatic of the social, political, economic, and cultural upheavals of the Weimar Republic; new opportunities for women were pitted against entrenched traditional gender roles. Nine contributions representing a wi

Making Oneself at Home: A Dialogue on Women, Culture, Belonging and Denizenship

Abstract Arnold and Meskimmon converse about shared and different experiences of relocating from southern Africa and the United States to Britain, which they identify as ‘home’. Their dialogue teases out the complexities of defining ‘homeland’ from the perspectives of culture and domicile. In an exchange of memories and references to writers, theorists and visual artists, Arnold and Meskimmon discuss the consequences of migration in terms of nationality, citizenship, denizenship, and art practice. The dialogue generates personal testimony about ‘be(com)ing’ transcultural and making oneself at home to effect a sense of belonging. Encounters with place and the roles of cultural artefacts are cited as mediators in negotiating relationships with ‘home’, and the concept of denizenship is advocated as a means of thinking through kinds of citizenship that might better describe the experiences of women as they make themselves at home in a global world.

Making worlds, making subjects: contemporary art and the affective dimension of global ethics

Abstract In response to Terry Smiths article, ‘Currents of world-making in contemporary art’ (2011), Meskimmons text seeks to extend the arguments that contemporary art is both decidedly ‘worldly’ and ‘with time’, exploring arts ethical agency in a globalised world. Arguing that Smiths ‘contemporal dialectic’ locates a materialist politics for contemporary practice, the article suggests ways in which contemporary practice might engender a future beyond teleology, through an active engagement with imagination, affect and the logic of the gift.

From the Cosmos to the Polis: On Denizens, Art and Postmigration Worldmaking

ABSTRACT The concept of “postmigration” as a non-binary way of understanding the exchange and movement of people and ideas across imaginative and materially enforced boundaries, is a compelling way to engage with contemporary politics, art and culture. It also has much to say to a contemporary cosmopolitanism that stresses the significance of embodied, responsible and intersubjective agency as the basis of an ethical worldmaking project. This essay deploys an alternative figuration, the denizen, as a means by which to materialize the imaginative force of art beyond the limits of representation and, in so doing, propose it as an active mode of experimental worldmaking. Arguing with and through a small number of specific case studies, the text brings the insights of feminist corporeal-materialism together with a postcolonial praxis of reading, writing and making within, and yet against, the grain of the exclusive limits of the “nation” and “her citizens”. The wilful act of the denizen in making herself at home everywhere becomes a way of imagining and materializing creative ecologies of belonging that are neither premised upon an essential call to blood nor an authentic claim to soil. Rather, the postmigration worldmaking explored here posits a radically open cosmos that emerges in mutual exchange with a response-able and responsible polis.