Refugees and Representation: An Impossible Necessity

Abstract

Staging a (fictional) encounter between two artworks, a work on paper by Indian artist Nalini Malani and the novel No Friend but the Mountains by Iranian-Kuridsh writer Behrouz Boochani, the text—an essay, rather than a traditional scholarly article—peruses the paradoxes of representing what cannot but must be (re-)presented. Issues such as the required modesty in the face of the suffering of others, the irrepresentability of trauma and intermediality are examined through the ongoing analysis of the two artworks.

Keywords

• refugee-dom
• expulsion
• trauma
• drawing
• intermediality
• unrepresentability