A collection of essays that imagines the migration of cultural signs across borders, of body language as the inalienable signs we carry with us, even if they are the only luggage we are able to carry. By placing history alongside artistic mutations, Body luggage asks questions of how avant-garde forms transmit or are provoked.
Why does a choreographer at the centre of the Viennese dance world—forced to flee the Nazi regime within a day to Bombay carrying nothing—exchange the word “dance” for only “movement art”? What induces an artist, after torture and years in exile, to engage in an ancient form of comic dance as a basis for pioneering performance art in Burma/Myanmar under the dictatorship of the ’90s? Why does an artist consider the body parts from mass graves in Bosnia suitable for a novel non-identitarian politics of memory?
With artworks by Kemi Bassene, Padmini Chettur, Jimmy Chishi, Chaw Ei Thein, Milica Tomić, Caecilia Tripp, Simon Wachsmuth, Gernot Wieland, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe, Portia Zvavahera. Texts by Bessora, Laure Guilbert, Desmond Kharmawphlang, Francesca Recchia, Nora Sternfeld, Françoise Vergès.

Edited by the Indian curator Zasha Colah in collaboration with Steirischer Herbst.

Beautifully designed by Archive Appendix and beautifully printed, too. Large format 23,5 x 30cm.
Soft cover, published in 2016, bilingual edition (English / German)
224 pages (color & duotone ill.)