Exhibit: Refugee Currents: Bodies at Sea

Refugee Currents: Bodies at Sea includes six original mixed art pieces inspired by major themes in Critical Refugee Studies research that honor the agency and resiliency of refugees and heighten public awareness and education of this global issue to cultivate coalitional consciousness and solidarity with the struggles of peoples around the world who are forced to migrate. As a technique of moving energy, each art piece is accompanied by poetry, meditation, or hip hop lyrics.

Through an intentional practice of connecting refugees’ epistemologies found in their stories of oceanic mobility, this exhibit seeks to create new centers where refugees’ unsettling hermeneutics converge with the poetics of spatial justice and sovereignty to link their (un)grievable relationships with a violent world, in the pursuit of hope and healing.

Refugee Currents: Bodies at Sea is created by Violet Barton, a PhD student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at UC Merced. As a Critical Race and Ethnic Studies scholar, her research interests in Critical Refugee Studies investigate how the transnational stateless refugee-subject from the global South resists, survives and subverts the global North.