Art for Coexistence: Unlearning the Way We See Migration is a deeply researched book that mobilizes ideas from philosophy, political theory, critical refugee studies, and other areas to assess the rhetorics of recent prominent artworks responding to a global surge of migration into Europe and the US in the last decade and a half. These artworks show migration to be a “dark coexistence” between “citizens-on-the-move” and those of affluent countries, appealing to audiences to transform this relation into a “luminous” one (8, 15). Christine Ross argues that art has responded to contemporary so-called migration crises by producing a series of “calls”—or exhortations to audiences—to historicize, become responsible, empathize, and story-tell. Historicization clarifies that migration is an “extension of the interrelated histories of modernity, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, environmental deterioration, and capitalism” (16–17). The call for responsibility, in turn, “meditat[es] on accountability” (17). The empathetic call centers on the “capacity to feel and understand the mental states and emotions of beings in situations of migratory distress,” while storytelling uses creative methods to “make migrant voices heard” (17). By means of these summonses, “viewers (primarily though not exclusively . . . from Europe and North America) . . . are interpellated as participating in the repressive forces of antimigration while being invited to question and counter these” (9). The challenging nature of the works under discussion, due not least to the spotlight on a global population subject to violence and hardship in art exhibited mainly to European and North American audiences—a dynamic Ross repeatedly emphasizes—raises thorny issues the book seriously grapples with, but all of which it cannot resolve. 

Part I of the book investigates historicization. Its first chapter provides a concise history of post-Cold War migration, showing how it has developed into a necropolitical form of restricted asylum, strict controls, and brutal practices. Works taking up this call bring to light the colonial roots of necropolitical migration. Despite these circumstances, Ross emphasizes here and throughout the book the importance of artists recognizing the “autonomy of migration,” or migrants’ volition in leaving homelands and the resistance to the political order this signifies (29). Chapter two considers John Akomfrah’s multiscreen moving image works of the late 2010s, arguing that their montage aesthetics evidence the violence of colonial modernity. Alongside a discussion of Isaac Julien’s work in chapter one, what Ross means by historicization is demonstrated here, as being open-ended and associative: these works historicize by juxtaposing poetic images that evoke histories of slavery, colonialism, migration, and climate change, allowing them to commingle through duration and viewers’ reflections.

Part II of the book on responsibility consists of three chapters on works about migrants in dangerous border zones that call for accountability and liability. As its arguments are the most intricate and extensive in the book, and resonate with contemporary debates regarding social justice politics, I will go into it in the most detail. The first chapter centers on Richard Mosse’s controversial Incoming (2014–17), which pictures migrants in securitized settings, illustrating an evolution in the European border regime over the last decades. This includes how borders have been externalized, how migrants have been channeled into perilous corridors, and how a humanitarian-military approach and “campization” have developed, contributing to the “becoming bare life” of migrating people (83, 89). Through its ruthless visualization mode of military thermal technology, the work seems to “revictimiz[e]” migrants, but in order that viewers “affectively experience their complicity in that becoming,” according to Mosse (80–81, 93). Ross characterizes this strategy as a “pharmakon” method: both remedy and poison, an argument recurring throughout the book about different artists’ approaches. Moreover, she contends that it is limited by its inability to acknowledge migrants’ “autonomy,” with “political subjectivities” being possible even under dire conditions (99). In so doing, Ross carefully interrogates the intention to reveal “complicity” through a review of political philosophy literature, particularly outlining differences that Iris Marion Young elaborates on between a blame-oriented “backward-looking” responsibility, accusing individuals not directly responsible, versus a “social connection model,” focusing on future action and solidarity (108).

Chapter four discusses a complex multimedia work by collective Forensic Oceanography (FO) that deploys high-tech tools usually controlled by states and corporations in order to reveal cases of deliberate non-assistance to endangered migrants by European border agencies. FO’s research-based works circulate across many art and non-art publics and forums, including in courtrooms as legal evidence. Here, Ross returns to Young’s writings, arguing that FO creates a hybrid model of responsibility. It includes a liability-oriented one, directed toward state actors rather than individuals, but also a forward-looking, action-oriented responsibility, because citizens are responsible when they participate in unjust structures. FO’s collaborative methods highlight migration’s “autonomy” by encouraging a “community of practice” (quoting Eyal Weizman) (126).

The section’s final chapter discusses Teresa Margolles’s La promesa (2012), the first example in the book to focus on the US-Mexico border, shifting from new media works to a complex participatory sculpture. In analyzing the artwork, Ross deals with a subtheme of responsibility, that of “care,” a politics valuing interpersonal relations and associated with feminist thinkers. Once again, Ross usefully outlines the literature of care, highlighting philosophers’ calls to “de-idealize” this concept, which is often invoked when the state withdraws from its responsibilities. As such, the call for care can, despite itself, “sustai[n] the neoliberalism it seeks to compensate for” (146–47). Furthermore, an idealized notion of care does not acknowledge its ambivalence as a response to injustice due to hierarchies between parties. In contrast, Ross argues that Margolles’s work makes a responsible appeal for care by highlighting labor and materiality, and by not directly presenting “victims.”

Part III of the book deals with calls for empathy, perhaps the most fraught of the book’s concepts, starting with a chapter delving into its treatment in psychology and philosophy. It ultimately shows the deep contemporary distrust of empathy due to its potential “vampirism” and biases. However, Ross concludes that empathy is a necessary though problematic and insufficient element of art calling attention to injustice. Thus, she maintains that artists who mobilize it must balance it by providing context as well as the perspectives of those empathized with, and this might successfully inspire solidarity and action. The section’s next chapter deals with three artworks centering on empathy, Human Flow (2017) by Ai Weiwei, a virtual-reality (VR) work by filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Tania Bruguera’s 10,142,926 (2018). The first two have been criticized for their deployment of empathy, but Ross reasons that it is important to study them because they demonstrate empathy’s conflicted nature. Examining critical reviews that point out the vampiric nature of empathy (Ai) and the naivete of claims about empathy’s effectiveness in the VR format (Iñárritu), Ross, nevertheless, finds redeeming features in their utilization of empathy. In contrast, Bruguera’s work is shown to self-consciously question empathy in relation to migration. The chapter ends with a review of literature on humanitarianism because it is usually premised on empathy, and its expansion as a form of governance is connected with the recent heightened securitization of borders.

Part IV on storytelling works somewhat differently: unlike the extensive discussion of literature beginning previous sections, this one launches into a chapter on four works that emphasize storytelling around contemporary migration. These analyses elaborate features of artists’ storytelling, particularly stressing collaboration between “tellers and listeners” (235). The next chapter centers on multimedia works of the Inuit collective Igloolik Isuma Productions, as part of Ross’s argument that the forced displacement of Indigenous people must be considered in relation to contemporary necropolitical migration and climate change. The book’s last chapter focuses on what Ross, after Timothy Morton, calls “weird” or flipped storytelling, found in notable contemporary artworks, including by Cree artist Kent Monkman, to rethink notions of hospitality (283).

T.J. Demos’s The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013), along with Okwui Enwezor’s 2002 Documenta 11 can be said to have oriented contemporary art history toward an era of what Demos terms “crisis globalization,” characterized by extreme inequalities and the figure of the migrant fleeing violence and poverty and encountering repression. In his book, Demos considers artworks that are connected by their use of experimental documentary methods. The relay in the book between subject matter and the political and aesthetic capacities of various documentary forms and hybrid mediums provides grounding, in contrast to the overwhelming focus on questions of content and ethics in Art for Coexistence. However, the latter allows for Ross’s deep engagement with the diverse modes of address of contemporary art responding to migration. Artworks focused on audiences’ moral responses to violent subjects—which are themselves undergirded by hierarchies between subjects, artists, and audiences—raise the kinds of difficult questions that have been brought up about viewing images of atrocity, especially in the history of photography. Ross deftly attends to these issues, and her probing of concepts including responsibility, complicity, care, empathy, and humanitarianism are especially beneficial for the fields of contemporary, political, and socially engaged art history, as crisis globalization continues to unfold as a crucial theme and reality.