1st Edition

Contemporary Art and Forced Displacement Methods of Intervention and Cultural Resilience

By Chrisoula Lionis Copyright 2026
200 Pages 22 Color & 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book urges for an understanding of contemporary art as being core to creative responses which intervene in the lived experience of forced displacement. Contemporary Art and Forced Displacement explores art practice which moves beyond mere representation toward practical intervention across five key areas: language, heritage and design, pedagogy and education, law and access to justice... Read more

Introduction: Praxes of Displacement  1. ‘انا لغتي’ (‘I am my Language’): Conventions, Case Studies and Absent Soundtracks  2. Πισω, Προς στο Μελλον (Back, Towards a Future): Landscape, Architecture and the Heritage of Displacement  3. ‘To be in and not of’: Experimental Pedagogies, Institutional Parasites and ‘Narragunnawali’  4. عبء الإثبات / Burdens of Proof: Legal Interventions and Investigations  5. Heirlooms for Here, After: Beneficiaries of the Archive and ‘Ngabay’  Conclusion: Αξιοπρέπεια: Situated Knowledge and Redress

 

Biography

Chrisoula Lionis is a research fellow at the University of Manchester School of Arts Languages and Cultures and Co-Director of pedagogical platform Artists for Artists.

 "An urgent profiling of art as agency and activism, this multi-sited analysis works in close attunement with resilience and survival taking shape against colonial displacement, forced migration and exile. Contemporary Art and Forced Displacement curates new works as well as networks of transnational advocacy, solidarities and decolonial interventions to rethink the crisis contemporary today."

-- Jennifer L Biddle, Director emLAB (the Ethnographic Media Lab) UNSW Art, Design and Architecture.