It situates Duchamp’s mixed-media projects, such as La Boîte-en-valise, and his installations, including the 1938 Surrealist exhibition in Paris, in the context of the early twentieth century’s world wars and nationalist formations.
120, January 2013), and has written several essays on the subject, such as “The Post-Natural Condition” in Artforum[4] This book looks at contemporary artists who have turned to documentary practice in order to investigate the mobile lives of migrants, refugees, stateless persons, and the politically dispossessed.
His analysis considers the work of artists from Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and North Africa, which portrays the frequently negative conditions of neoliberal globalization, and which connects viewers to the lived experiences of economic and political crisis.
The book traces the work of these artists who have each travelled to former European colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa in recent years in order to investigate past and present traumas and injustices, resulting in projects that were also made around the time of the 50th anniversary of the independence of numerous African countries.
Demos' text analyses the artist’s installations and conceptual mixed-media pieces – such as his La Boîte-en-valise, which Duchamp called his “portable museum.” The book places these project in relation to the aesthetic and geopolitical dislocations of early twentieth-century nationalisms and world war.