Debates on the status of »non-native« individuals and sections of the populace have recently grown more heated again. This is manifested not simply in calls for special treatment by the law for individuals affected by current deportation practice, but also in more general discussions on the scope and details of what is dubbed the »settlement and residence act«; in a nutshell, aliens law. In addition, however, broader political concerns, such as the installation of an international border-management system extending across Europe, also have a considerable impact on this debate. At the same time – and this is the other, civil society side of the debate – questions of cultural belonging, national identity or an up-to-date notion of citizenship (of a state) are less clear than ever.
The »Aliens Law« edition pursues individual thematic strands of this debate and looks at their theoretical and cultural implications. Do we really find ourselves, as Etienne Balibar has diagnosed, facing a resurgence of the concept of »race« – a return that can no longer be pinned down in terms of biological categories but certainly can be identified in terms of a whole host of symptomatic cultural phenomena? Balibar’s analysis is illuminating in as much as it understands the figure of the »racially« marked foreigner not as the object of racism that is kindled anew or is decontextualized, nor indeed as the object of racism per se, but instead views this figure as being linked to the categories of class, gender and religion. Taking this aspect into account also seems to be the central issue at stake when addressing how it is possible to represent community and those excluded from it. Krystian Woznicki explores this problem in the light of two photographs taken in connection with activities of the »sans papiers« movement in France. It is not the reality of being excluded that is up for discussion here, but instead – one might say as a blind spot of all communities - the gaze on what is shared by all, however uncertain and precarious that may appear in specific instances.
Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann explore commonality as universality in the sense of the »globalised« art system in their essay. In the light of the current art boom in the United Arab Emirates, they differentiate between a legitimate assertion of human rights universalism and a pseudo-universality that appears ever more frequently in globalised art. In contrast, in his essay on the contemporary Turkish scene, Süreyyya Evren portrays how fractured and multi-faceted the artistic approach to minority population groups may turn out to be within a particular national framework. It is not solely criticism of overly orthodox patterns of representation that is brought to bear here, but also an inventive exploration of social and political control mechanisms.
This paper, along with many other contributions to this edition, emphasises a problem that will remain virulent for an unforeseeable time: how will today’s art – responding to and reacting against prevailing political ideas – learn to deal with the figure of the Stranger, be they male or female?