With reference to the works of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Isaac Julien, Buchra Khalili, Cassils, and rafa esparza, this talk addresses the way language and speech are deployed by artists to address the post-migratory condition. In political and poetic interventions, these artists explore the tensions of geography and mobility, as well as the way language shapes existence through its opacity, the forms and consequences of its domination, and its potential to be reimagined.

Professor Jennifer A. González teaches History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is a faculty member in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. Her research engages political and theoretical discourses and their intersection with contemporary art. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She publishes in widely in journals such as, Camera Obscura, Bomb, Open Space, Art Journal, Aztlán the Journal of the Archives of American Art and in numerous exhibition catalogs, most recently in Diego Riveras America, SFMOMA (2022) and Amalia Mesa Bains, Archeology of Memory (2023). Her first book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her second book focused on the MacArthur-award-winning artist Pepón Osorio (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She is the chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019) which was included in the top art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020.