The relation between belonging and belongings – the actual physical property carried by migrants on their journeys – in the multi-media field of contemporary art has a long tradition of material practice.  It can be seen to begin with the modernist trope of the suitcase or “valise” as it emerged within the European tradition of the historical avant-garde.  In this presentation, BGC Fields of the Future Fellow Saloni Mathur will show how artists today, especially those from the global South, deploy material and pictorial strategies that both build upon and depart from the nostalgic terms of these “suitcase stories” in ways that evoke more perilous pathways for the migrant in the 21st century.