Performing that which exceeds us: aesthetics of sincerity and obscenity during the 'refugee crisis'

Focusing on examples from theatre (On the Move festival, London International Festival of Theatre/Royal Court Theatre, London 2016), film (Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuoccoamare, 2016) and the visual arts (Ai Weiwei’s Safe Passage, Berlin 2016), this article proposes that in order to think through questions of efficacy and value of performance that seeks to engage with the pain of others, we must consider the interrelation of migration and excess. I explore the multiple meanings and performances of excess in artistic practice and interrogate the contradictions and potentialities that emerge in works that perform excess as a form of what Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou have defined as ‘political responsiveness’. In an attempt at understanding excess as a sensibility that underpins the ethics and politics of performance in response to the ‘refugee crisis’, the article focuses on two interrelated areas: the aesthetics of the sincere and the obscene. In doing so, I attempt to offer a way of thinking of the performance of ‘refugee crisis’ as excess in the logic of the neoliberal system, which perpetuates that system.