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Diaspora in the Field of Vision

This essay scrutinises the impact of migration on contemporary art practices and explores how the British art education system has engendered specific possibilities for art. Contemporary art practices that have emerged out of the existing art school structure in Britain have enabled a multitude of practices to be given the current status that they hold in debates about visual culture. Using Piper and Boyce as examples, Sprio argues that since the expansion of post-war education in Britain, diasporic artists have become visible in small but significant numbers. They have been supported in part by those sympathetic to the politics of educational equality, but also by those for whom education and the diasporic experience was the lifeline that enabled both the art practices that now constitute contemporary art and also the critical debates that are now commonplace within contemporary art education. Drawing upon earlier research about British Fine Art education, this essay addresses some of the key issues that are apparent in the work of contemporary diasporic artists such as Zarina Bhimji – who live, work and have studied in Britain, in relation to ideas of displacement, migration, power and ethics. These ideas are examined within the context of the privatisation of higher education and provide a critique of possible outcomes of the changes to art school training. In addition, the essay looks at how emerging contemporary art practices (for example, live art practices) figure in the ongoing hierarchies that surround and dominate the existing institutional structures that formulate higher education in Britain. Part of the originality of this essay lies in the way that the author links the post-war expansion of higher education with the direct success of black and Asian artists in the contemporary art world.