Watch on Vimeo

The act of migration entails movement among elements, whether images, information, or people, that results in networks that connect multiple times and places across the globe. Examining such migratory structures in film-based work by Renée Green, this lecture also addressed questions raised by the proliferation of gallery-based film installations in light of Afro-Atlantic histories of travel, exile, and diaspora.

Kobena Mercer is a professor in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. His research examines African American, Caribbean, and Black British artists in modern and contemporary art, and his book, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s, was published by Duke University Press, featuring chapters on John Akomfrah, Kerry James Marshall, Yinka Shonibare, Isaac Julien, and Renée Green. In addition to monographic studies on Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien, Renee Green, and Keith Piper, as well as historical studies of James Van Der Zee, Romare Bearden, and Adrian Piper, he is the author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994). Mercer is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing and is the series editor of Annotating Art's Histories, co-published by MIT and INIVA, whose titles are Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008).