Unfinished Conversations – multi-layered polyvocal approaches to migration and identity in documentary installations

Over the last two or three decades, documentary installations have become a prominent feature of art exhibitions, biennials, and museums. This form and context of presentation does not simply involve a change of location from the cinema to the art space. It inscribes the documentary moving image into a different regime of discourses, medial and spatial arrangements and approaches to spectatorship that encourage polyvocality, semiotic openness and multiple points of view. Characteristics that make these “expanded dispositifs” particularly suited to addressing the complex ramifications of migration (see Kim 2022). The present paper aims to explore this argument through the analysis of examples. It will look at works by Zineb Sedira (Mother Tongue, 2002), John Akomfrah (The Unfinished Conversation, 2012) and Pınar Öğrenci (Glück auf in Deutschland, 2024), analysing their use of the exhibition space and the multi-screen installation to convey the multi-layered experience and effects of migration and the resulting complex entanglement of identities. The paper also aims to show how these works, by reading the archive or its absence against the grain, by combining sound and visual material into complex spatial choreographies and arrangements, open up a space that not only investigates the question of migration and (diasporic) identity, but also constitutes an offer to the viewer to engage with these questions by bodily moving through the installation, to enter into a dialogue and thus to become part of the “unfinished conversation”.

As part of the panel F6 “Migration and Displacement in Contemporary Documentary Form” with Jasmin Kermanchi, Florian Mundhenke, and Thomas Weber.
Chair: Ozgur Cicek (University of Amsterdam).

More information:

https://cms.necs.org/sites/default/files/documents/conference/necs2025_finalprogram_2.pdf