Unpacked Cases

The manifold notion of migratory aesthetics serves as the critical grounding for this analysis focusing on Mohamad Hafez’s and Ahmed Badr’s multimedia installation, UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage (2017-2020), a socially politically committed artistic project. Migratory conceptual frame can encompass artifacts reflecting upon experience forced migration, displacement, uprootedness. However, concept also proposes engendering platform confluence art political. In accordance with theories Mieke Bal, Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, Jacques Rancière, “political” is meant to signify space generative conflict, an active, communal, participatory encounter between sentient bodies artworks. UNPACKED confronts audience many levels: physically, by leaving them in limbo, suspended inside outside, private public, safety threat; conceptually (owing phenomenal, embodied viewers), provoking sense dislocation homelessness, resulting potential identification status being refugee, migrant, asylum seeker. encapsulates, both spatially temporally, invisible silenced trauma eventually effectuating collective understanding constitutive political art. (GM)