In his artistic research, Giovanni Perillo aims to generate conflicts with oneself, to weaken certainties, stereotypes and rigid expectations, encouraging a dialogue to express one's reflections on the real freedom of one's choices and on the possible influences that they imply. Through a détourner, a displacement, a deviation from alienating cultural mechanisms, aesthetic experimentation can become practical for a transformation towards a different self-awareness. "Taking the cue from the theory of events, I started to research stimuli and creative interaction processes through my artistic investigation and production. The stimuli had to be able to arouse behaviours and interpretations that are far from conformist and pre-established models. The interpretations, as answers to a stimulus coming from reality, are the significant consequences of the sense and vision of reality. The conventional and conformist interpretations form the specific psychological structure of a culture, and for this reason, they are its identity. If the reactions of the individuals who interact with artwork were not spontaneous, heterogeneous or unpredictable, they would show the homogenized and homogenizing game of taking part to practices where roles and goals of the players are pre-establish and reinforce a system of perception of reality that is influenced by dominant socio-cultural models." - Excerpt from the Introduction by Giovanni Perillo "In Art of Displacement, Giovanni Perillo establishes a new and important dialogue around ethnicity, displacement and migration. Spanning the arts as well as the social sciences—and in particularly psychology—Perillo asks us to take a leap of faith. He wants us to leave the comfort of our academic homes and to escape our “ivory towers” and consider what displacement means. Establishing his discussion in a project he calls “the Aesthetics of Migrations,” Perillo pushes boundaries, challenges assumptions. Perillo uses the Art of Displacement to help us navigate the beliefs and preconceived assumptions we bring to our encounters with migrants and strangers. More importantly, he asks us to recognize the constructed nature of our assumptions we make about migrants and strangers. Once we recognize our own bias, he offers the opportunity to search for alternatives. The French philosopher/sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that human life is organized around habitus or the ingrained habits, skills, and dispositions that we possess, that are grounded in life experience; and that organize our response to the world around us. Habitus is powerful and creates an assumption of the natural order that becomes real as it is shared and used to organize beliefs, laws and social rules. Perillo helps us recognize how a Western habitus limits and restricts our ability to connect; in fact, he goes so far as to argue our shared habitus, embodied in the maps we create, fragment our world and the people in it in ways that drive stereotypes, prejudice and the rise of nationalistic xenophobia we see today." - Jeffrey H. Cohen, PhD, Professor of Anthropology at Ohio State University, United States Content PREFACE by Jeffrey H. Cohen INTRODUCTION MEMORIZATION OF FACES, ASSOCIATED WITH PROFESSIONS AND CHARACTERS IMAGE OF THE WORD, WORD TO THE IMAGE THE INFLUENCE OF STEREOTYPES AND PREJUDICES IN AESTHETIC CHOICES AESTHETICS OF MIGRATIONS SKIN colourS TEST II ARTWORKS SERIES OF MAPS WITH MIGRATORY EXCHANGES IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE RULE OF CONTIGUITY AND WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF RETURN TO PREVIOUSLY INHABITED REGIONS SKIN colourS TEST NEARLY EQUAL PALO DEL COLLE SKIN colourS PROJECT SKIN colourS TEST II

Artwork by Lawrence Weiner.

"The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River in China is a massive project entwined in controversy. When finally completed in 2009, it will stand as the world's largest generator of hydroelectric power, with a yearly output equal to that of fifty million tons of coal or fifteen nuclear power plants. However, the dam's 375-mile reservoir has already displaced over one million people and submerged over one thousand towns and villages. This publication examines the work that four leading contemporary Chinese artists - Chen Qiulin, Yun-Fei Ji, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhuang Hui - have created in response to the dam. Despite differences in backgrounds and artistic practices, these artists have engaged with the theme of displacement, responding to the movement of people, the demolition of old towns and construction of new cities, and the astonishing changes the project is bringing to the local landscape. Their powerful works represent four major branches of contemporary Chinese art: ink painting, realist oil painting, conceptual photography, and performance and new media art." "Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art continues a series of Smart Museum catalogues produced in conjunction with Wu Hung's groundbreaking exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art. Through extensive illustrations, interviews, and a substantial essay by Wu Hung, the publication documents the exhibiting artists' work, backgrounds, and concerns. Other essays extend consideration to representations of the Three Gorges Dam in film and in contemporary art in the West. Moving beyond any single medium or trend, Displacement offers nuanced, thought-provoking perspectives on a project of great social, environmental, and global concern."--BOOK JACKET.

A teenager is pulled back in time to witness her grandmother's experiences in World War II-era Japanese internment camps in Displacement, a historical graphic novel from Kiku Hughes. Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II. These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself "stuck" back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive. Kiku Hughes weaves a riveting, bittersweet tale that highlights the intergenerational impact and power of memory.

In her graphic memoirs, New York Times-best selling cartoonist Lucy Knisley paints a warts-and-all portrait of contemporary, twentysomething womanhood, like writer Lena Dunham (Girls). In the next installment of her graphic travelogue series, Displacement, Knisley volunteers to watch over her ailing grandparents on a cruise. (The book’s watercolors evoke the ocean that surrounds them.) In a book that is part graphic memoir, part travelogue, and part family history, Knisley not only tries to connect with her grandparents, but to reconcile their younger and older selves. She is aided in her quest by her grandfather’s WWII memoir, which is excerpted. Readers will identify with Knisley’s frustration, her fears, her compassion, and her attempts to come to terms with mortality, as she copes with the stress of travel complicated by her grandparents’ frailty.

This collection offers a response to the view that migration disrupts national heritage. Investigating the mediation provided by migrant art, it asks how we can rethink art history in a way that uproots its reliance on space and place as stable definitions of style. Beginning with an invaluable overview of migration studies terminology and concepts, Art and migration opens dialogues between academics of art history and migrations studies through a series of essays and interviews. It also re-evaluates the cultural understanding of borders and revisits the contours of the art world – a supposedly globalised community re-assessed here as structurally bordered by art market dynamics, career constraints, gatekeeping and patronage networks.

In Context: Violence and Contemporary Art in Colombia -- Salcedo's Influences: Artists, Works, Practices -- The Six Visual Strategies -- Organic and Ephemeral: Materiality in Salcedo's Most Recent Works -- Inherent Vice and the Ship of Theseus / Narayan Khandekar -- Artist Biography and Exhibition History