The Multilayeredness of Mobility and the Visual Art Language: The Material Turn, the Inequality in ‘Mobility Capital’, the Hierarchy in Mobility, and Art

Abstract

This study explores what mobility means from the social science perspective and how it becomes a form of capital in todays modern highly mobile society. It also investigates how it appears in arts by analyzing the artworks in the exhibition titled To you: Move Toward Where You Are. It seems that mobility characterized by complexity, hybridity, vitality, materiality, and assemblage is somehow part of the Material Turn. Transportation, capital, power, cities, refugees, migration, tourism, climate crisis, systems, infrastructure, control, surveillance, communications, gender, race, disability, and so on. These may seem heterogeneous multi-layered issues, but all these relate to uneven mobility. And mobility inequalities occur in the dynamics of their relations. In the highly-mobile society where the fetishism of movement prevails, mobility becomes more uneven. When freedom, acceleration, convenience and safety increase, so does censorship, control and restriction. Gaining velocity, efficiency, convenience, and safety of movement can undermine the rights of others. We should envisage the hidden power relations under the rights of (im)mobility. Characteristics of mobility and its inequalities directly and indirectly emerge in the artworks exhibited in To you: Move Toward Where You Are. We need to consider how mobility justice can be practiced against mobility inequalities in the hierarchy of mobility capital, uneven mobility, and mobility injustice. Art which thinks beyond thinking will provide new stimulus and imagination to the practice.