Engaging FLEFF 2025’s theme of 'movement,' the Arts in Movement exhibition investigates ways that artists both respond to social changes through movement and also initiate news ways of conceiving movement as a socially engaged arts practice that opens questions, not always considered by the computational, natural, and social sciences.
Arts in Movement considers art that literally moves, as in cookbooks, songs, and painting expeditions, alongside art that emerges from movement, as in field and auditory research on forced migration and voluntary itinerancy. The exhibition focuses on how movement reroutes thinking and making at a nexus of environmentally-inflected topics such as agriculture, damming, food, labor, memory, migration, pollution, and trade.
Collectively, the work prompts timely reflection on the right to movement – for people, songs, water – within the accelerated and amplified enclosure on all aspects of life, which is morphing from neoliberalism to neofascism.
Pat Badani’s Where are you from?_Stories queries portraiture through human migration. As a self-portrait, the work maps the artist’s own wanderings across six cities, from Buenos Aires, where she was born, to cities where she once lived, Mexico City, Toronto, Montréal, and Paris, to her current place of residence, Chicago, and her trilingualism (Spanish, French, English). Posed as a question to fellow wanderers, tourists, nomads, refugees, immigrants, migrants, and residents, Where are you from?_Stories derives portraiture in motion, where images migrate from film-theatres to video-screening rooms, to exhibition-spaces, and to Web-spaces.
Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal’s audio-video installation SRS (Silk Road Songbook) traces the movement of songs along the Silk Routes from Xi’an to Istanbul. The multiscreen installation weaves land and songs, as musical genres and languages maintain cultural identities across the ancient trading routes into the present. As mapped between Ozkal’s and Chen’s ancestral homes, respectively between Turkey and China, the work neither romanticizes nor demonizes these places, but instead moves to include voices absent in Western accounts of the Silk Routes by sounding five acoustic ecologies from the Eurasian migration route, connecting women’s voices and shared ambient sounds of the land.
Founder of the artist collective the Pak Khawateen Painting Club (PKPC), Saba Khan’s work in mixed media installation The Tide Country focuses on the unequal redistribution of resources by massive damming projects on the Indus River. By impeding the movement of water and sediment from the Himalaya Mountains to the Arabian Sea, the dams also endanger ways of life and livelihoods for indigenous humans and nonhumans. As they visited various dams, Khan and the other PKPC participants also learn that movement to some parts of Pakistan is easier than others.
In the context of increasingly divided worlds along the lines of virtual spaces, and physical militarized state borders and criminalized movement across them, the work in the exhibition points to the shifting levels of comfort of different people in their lived experiences of navigating virtual, and moving through urban and rural spaces, whether across continents, rivers, or mountains.
Collectively, the works investigate the movements and impeded movements of cultures, ideas, technology, and interactions with other cultures, human and non-human, at different points over the past six millennia. As dynamic forms that engage material and immaterial dimensions of this constant flow, the works push against state-centered perspectives on movement, as an abstracted and reducible force for sociocultural change.
They draw instead on lived, collaborative, and participatory experiences, thus centering art as a process of movement that both responds to and questions how politics are embodied. The works are more than images and objects exhibited in galleries. They are the artists’ experiences in researching and making them. All of the work involved movements within spaces that were not always open.
The exhibition went live on Friday 28 March, 2025 and will conclude with an online panel discussion with featured artists on Friday 11 April, 2025.
Dale Hudson is an Associate Professor in the Film and New Media Program and MFA in Art and Media at New York University Abu Dhabi. His latest book is Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean Meet (Indiana UP, 2024), coedited with Alia Yunis.
Claudia Costa Pederson is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wichita State University, Kansas. Her most recent book, Mexican Media Art, Ecologies, The Posthuman, and Politics (Routledge, 2025), was awarded the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant in 2022.