Celeste Ianniciello

Abstract

This essay is focused on the way contemporary art has transformed the museum from the traditional Occidental place of construction and affirmation of national identity and superiority into a dynamic space of both aesthetic research and critical contact with the multiple and migrant realities of the modern world. Like the nation-state, the museum as a nationalist institution is facing an inexorable process of decline: it is becoming global. In this sense, the analysis is focused on some artworks produced by the migrant artists Mona Hatoum, Zineb Sedira and Lara Baladi, which are all based on the idea of «trace», «residue», «presence-absence», «transit», «passage». Their works are considered as an example of how art may offer the possibility of negotiating between local and global, inside and outside, personal and collective, proper and improper, here and elsewhere, present and past; hence the possibility of reconfiguring both cultural memory and propel it into a more worldly condition.

Celeste Ianniciello holds a PhD in «Cultural and postcolonial studies of the Anglophone world» from the University of Naples «L’Orientale». Commencing from the relation between I/eye and place in female migrant subjectivities, her research analyzes the visual (auto)biography of female artists from Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean countries as a contrapuntal example set against the epistemology of geographical, cultural and sexual borders. She has participated in national and international conferences, and published critical essays on literature, cinema and visual arts.