Complicit cartographies

Since 2011, the civil war in Syria has displaced more than 14 million people, with over 6 million people living outside Syria ( UNHCR, 2024 , March). The settling of close to a million Syrian nationals in countries linked to the EU has also occasioned an unsettling debate regarding the responsibilities of the EU, and the US, to people living within their broad spheres of economic and political influence. In 2015 images of refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean Sea dominated the news cycle. Between 2015 and 2018, I visited the Biennials in Venice (2015, 2017), Dakar (2016) Berlin (2016), Manifesta (Zurich 2016), São Paulo (2016), Montevideo (2016), Shanghai (2017), Taipei (2017), Documenta (Kassel/Athens 2017), Sharjah (2017), Beijing (2017), Yokohama (2017), and Sydney (2018), all of which included projects incorporating aspects of the global refugee crisis, many highlighting Syrian asylum seekers. This chapter will focus on selected installations in Venice, Dakar, Sharjah, Yokohama, and Sydney, as they provide examples of a complex postcolonial artistic response to specific dimensions of the refugee crisis. While artist Ai Wei Wei made headlines with his interventions at the Yokohama Triennale and the Biennale of Sydney, the impact of this crisis was evident throughout these biennials. The trends I have found, the shared motifs, the divergences among artists, biennials, and critical responses cannot be reduced to committees – rather they speak to the ways artists are imbricated in the crisis, as well as highlight the complicity of border making in a crisscrossed world. The project here contributes to critical challenges that emerge in decentering European cultural institutions in understanding modern and contemporary art production.