ABSTRACT
As an itinerant medium grounded in lived experience, tattoos allow wearers to visually map their travel through space and authenticate their experiences of displacement on those same traveling bodies. This chapter examines the work of three artists who build on the tattoo's historical relationship to bodily mobility and systems of power to formulate critical geographies. Here, the works of Qin Ga, Wafaa Bilal, and Douglas Gordon are used to demonstrate the ways in which tattooed cartographies speak to disrupted notions of homeland and shifting conceptual boundaries by virtue of their location on the body's own boundary: skin. Each of the artworks examined within this chapter serves as a touchstone for discussing the thematic relevance of tattooed cartographies in relation to the experiences of forcibly displaced subjects, namely their relationship to issues of mobility, marginality, nationalism, liminality, borderlines, (in)visibility, unity, and division among others. In addition, these works expand the role of the tattoo beyond historically localized concerns and cultural traditions to a global medium ripe for twenty-first century artistic engagement – a shift, as Karly Etz argues, that is especially poignant given the current tensions surrounding the immigration crisis and the rise of nationalism around the world.
