It is perhaps the ability of art to translate the singular into the plural that provides the greatest potential for art to affect change outwith its own borders. Each individual action mentioned in this text, taken out of their contexts and as isolated incidents, are simply acts of singular citizens having their passport stamped, receiving a counterfeit passport or dubiously obtaining an EU passport. Once viewed in their artistic contexts, however, they become plural, one passport being cancelled (in the case of Jarrar) becoming a symbol of the denial of citizenship in Palestine, one marriage (in the case of Ostojić) standing as an emblem highlighting the plights of innumerable citizens in a comparable position to the artist.
In our contemporary globalised world in which a complex network of multinational corporations and nations maintains hegemony, a new type of ‘Empire’ as Hardt and Negri would say, it may perhaps seem an anachronism that the 19th century construct of the nation state retains near exclusive and universal control over the flow of humans across the planet
