Be/held

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses famously opens with the miraculous transformation of two immigrants into figures of the divine and diabolical as they fall from the exploded fuselage of a jumbo jet. Their descent inaugurates an extended reflection on what is perhaps the most insistent question posed by migrant experience in postcolonial studies: by what means does newness arrive in the world? Echoing Rushdie, Graeme Millar's 2006 audio-visual installation Beheld was inspired by accounts of migrants who have fallen to their deaths from the undercarriage of aircraft. These include Mohamed Ayaz from Pakistan, who fell from a Boeing 777 into a Homebase car park in Richmond in 2001, and Alberto Vazquez Rodriguez and Michael Fonseca, Cuban teenagers who fell into a field in Surrey near Gatwick airport. Miller took recordings of ambient sound and photographs of the sky above the ten locations where migrants had previously fallen. The images were then transferred to ‘ten fragile glass bowls of sky’. Visitors to the installation were encouraged to handle the bowls, which activated the sound recordings. The absence of the bodies that marks each site as the subject of several incursions (of the immigrants themselves; deterritorialized sovereign power; or Millar's camera and the viewer's gaze) also establishes a sense of border-consciousness often far away from the recognized border, in the most prosaic locations.