Island thought The Neolithic in Jo Baer's Land of the Giants and sovereignty in Sung Hwan Kim's Drifting Across the Sea

This book is driven by the urgency to counterbalance a Eurocentric mediation of history through two artwork series as Deleuzian lines of flight that originate from two island nations, each with long-term sovereignty movements. Part one focuses on In the Land of the Giants (2009–13) by American-born artist Jo Baer (1929–2025) who was based in Amsterdam from the early 1980s on. Her six paintings root out inequitable social relations through a study of enclosures in Neolithic Ireland that prescribe how knowledge itself would later be enclosed in the West. Baer’s interest in hierarchies among bodies and land use foregrounds the focus of part two: A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–) by Korean-born, Honolulu-based artist Sung Hwan Kim (1975). Kim’s first two film environments in his ongoing series relate the effects of Korean migration on Hawaiian indigenous populations. His works continue and transform conceptual threads within Baer’s practice, including migration and displacement, as well as history as a fabulist, anticolonial practice. The artists each enact an adjacency to histories not their own, and feature objects as knowledge carriers: Baer depicts domestic megaliths along old straight tracks from Neolithic Ireland to the SWANA region, while Kim reproduces archival objects that bear witness to migration. Their intersection elicits an intergenerational, transnational, speculative feminist methodology for responding to the entangled hyperobject of racialisation and war. It is a personal trajectory that might guide how one generates stories towards sovereign ways of being together amid climate catastrophe and injustice.