Can the Arts Save Human Rights? Human Rights Truth-Claims in a Post-Truth Era

Lead Research Organisation: University of York
Department Name: Centre for Applied Human Rights

Abstract

Human rights is in crisis. Recent political upheavals - Trump, Brexit, the rise of populist political parties, certain responses to COVID-19 - have both globalised a post-truth politics and embedded them in Western democracies. These upheavals mean that we are at a moment of transition and contention globally. Established languages of social justice, such as human rights, are under siege while new languages struggle to be born.

The research engages with two hypotheses. First, that collaborative visual artistic practices involving artists and activists illuminate a downgrading of facts in human rights work, and a search for alternative or complementary frames and narratives (new languages or idioms that are primarily visual, performative, and virtual). Second, that co-created visual art sheds light on a shift not only from facts to frames/narratives, but also to countering post-truth forms of denial. Collaboration is our focus because of its experimental, imaginative and interdisciplinary potential to inform new languages or idioms of human rights. It is an exciting element of a solidarity politics in the post-truth era.

The project is co-hosted by the Centre for Applied Human Rights (CAHR), University of York, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), as a collaborating organisation. CAHR has a decade of experience working at the intersection of the arts and human rights, while the YSP has a long-standing interest in linking the arts to social justice and policy and practice debates. Partners supporting the research - academic partners, country-based arts organisations and human rights agencies, and the international development NGO, ActionAid - share a commitment to using the arts to mobilise social change, and provide diverse insights into the arts-activism nexus, deep knowledge of collaborative practice, and access to a wide range of physical and online public/community spaces.

This research project combines two hitherto discrete bodies of research and practice. The first strand includes 3 Work Packages drawing on work by CAHR: 1) Arctivism, a collaboration between CAHR and the Open Society Foundations, which funds activists-artists collaborations across the world responding to COVID-19. 2) Development alternatives, a collaboration between CAHR and ActionAid, which engages activists, artists and academics intending to imagine alternatives to mainstream international development. 3) York Human Rights City network, a multi-stakeholder initiative that established York as the UK's first human rights city and seeks to operationalise human rights at a local level and develop a city-based culture of human rights. The second strand features 2 Work Packages relating to transitional justice, a field that informs how countries affected by authoritarian rule and conflict address the past. The cases are Colombia (ongoing transitional justice) and Canada (post-transitional justice).

As such, the Work Packages span local, national and global levels; the past, present and future; and intersections between major contemporary crises (attacks on global democracy and human rights, COVID-19, global poverty and inequality, climate change). The research for each Work Package is organised in three stages: a first, scoping stage taking stock of existing work, which will then inform the funding and research accompaniment of new collaborations as a second stage. A third stage focuses on outputs, dissemination and impact.

A decolonial perspective - emphasising context, plural perspectives, challenging Western binaries - informs the interdisciplinary methods of the research, the range of artistic, practice-based and academic outputs envisaged, and the multiple routes to impact. The project will analyse and contribute to new languages or idioms of human rights, anticipating that these will embrace ambiguity, metaphor, irony, disruption, dissonance, and multiple possible readings.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Title Buriganga: A River or a Past? 
Description As part of our Conversations with Testimony commissioning call, the Buriganga River in Bangladesh, once a vibrant hub of festivals, local songs, and shared stories, now bears witness to a profound loss. The boatman's song, once echoing across the water, has fallen silent, a casualty of unplanned urbanisation, industrial waste, and the relentless pressures of a growing city. This project seeks to give voice to the river and those whose lives are intertwined with its fate, exploring the unspoken testimonies of a dying ecosystem and prompting a vital conversation about our relationship with the natural world. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/buriganga-a-river-or-a-past
 
Title Endlovini 
Description As part of the Conversations with Testimony Commissioning Call, this project engages and highlights the impact of inequality and safety in relation to land occupation in South Africa, focusing on the silenced voices. If you visit any black area in South Africa - especially in the city - you will find a housing section called ENDLOVINI. The Nguni term has a double meaning. The first literal translation is 'at the elephant/place of the elephant'. The second meaning is more nuanced and slightly loaded: 'the place at which we charged in and settled'. The term invokes, at least for mother-tongue speakers, a powerful image of resistance. In collaboration with Onsite Collective, artist Wezile Harmans questioned and exercised the notion of collective remembering, and explored how it can patiently help one to have a clear picture of certain events that happened and transpired, looking at Endlovini as a space of urgency and as a form of archive. The project was exhibited at WHATIF THE WORLD Gallery, Cape Town, from the 15th June to 27th July 2024. 
Type Of Art Artistic/Creative Exhibition 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/endlovini
 
Title Future Collaboration, Bangladesh 
Description As part of our Conversations in a Kiosk call, this film explores issues of environmental and cultural sustainability. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/future-collaboration
 
Title Lab Memoria 
Description Based in Colombia and commissioned as part of the Kiosks Commissioning Call, Lab Memoria is a multidisciplinary collective whose purpose is to create artistic devices, processes, and sensitive experiences around the community, territory, art, and the appropriation and dissemination of the contents of the Final Report of the Truth Commission in Colombia. Based on this premise, three devices inspired by the 'Teatro Lambe-Lambe' were created. These are miniature theater boxes placed on a tripod with sound and video projections, allowing for an immersive transmedia experience based on micro-stories related to community, nature, hope, resilience, human and non-human suffering, and the intersection between activism and art. 
Type Of Art Artistic/Creative Exhibition 
Year Produced 2023 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/lab-memoria
 
Title Nature in Harmony: Body and Sound Echoes and Sounds that Resonate 
Description Within the Conversation with Testimonies Commissioning call, this project was conducted in Mahates and San José del Playón, Colombia, where workshops, creative laboratories, and a performative experience took place. During this experience, participants explored the voices of nature and their impact on transforming the human body, intending to reconnect communities with their environment and history, particularly after the effects of armed conflict. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/naturaleza-en-armonia-ecos-corporales-y-sonoros-que-resuenan
 
Title Pamela Enyonu residency at the University of York 
Description As one of our residencies, Pamela Enyonu's undertook research and artwork on the theme of 'Thoughts on paper: the economies of being an African artist in a global world'. She stayed and exhibited work in David Kato College, named after a fellow-Ugandan, a human rights defender who worked on LGBT+ rights and was murdered in 2011 (he had been on a protective fellowship at the Centre for Applied Human Rights, University of York, in 2010). 
Type Of Art Artistic/Creative Exhibition 
Year Produced 2023 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/pamela-enyonu
 
Title Pidada Intimacy: Exercising Multispecies Cinema Inside the Mangrove Swamp 
Description As part of our Conversations with Testimony commissioning call, this project looks beyond the human lens of traditional cinema to capture the voices of the non-human. In Muaragembong's mangroves, Indonesia, humans and primates endure a shared environmental crisis. Through an experiment in generating a multispecies cinema, we invite nonhumans as our co-creators: as the director, the sound designer, the narrator, the camera person, or even the editor. By taking the notion of cinema as memory in the multispecies context, this project aims to expand our understanding towards sensing and recording as an attempt to reveal the representation of multispecies injustice. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/the-pidada-intimacy
 
Title Rafooghar - The House that Mends 
Description Rafooghar (inspired by the word Rafoogar/ Rafu Gar, needle-worker, darner or a cloth mender, ??? ??) by Compassion Contagion was commissioned in India as part of the Kiosks Commissioning Call. Rafooghar invited women from diverse backgrounds who often face social and cultural barriers that restrict their mobility, participation in public life, and access to education and healthcare, to join a series of arts-based workshops over six months to help strengthen vital social and emotional connections. These workshops aimed to address participants' concerns and fears, while also facilitating conversations on identity, rights, and their concepts of justice within the context of their identity. The stitching and embroidery activities were guided by templates that encouraged both personal and collective reflection, becoming mediums of therapeutic and creative expression, as well as powerful tools of empowerment, advocacy and social change. The work was exhibited in a variety of ways, largely in community spaces. 
Type Of Art Artistic/Creative Exhibition 
Year Produced 2023 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/rafooghar-1
 
Title Songs of Hope and Joy 
Description As part of the Conversations with Testimony call, Pilot Theatre collaborated with York-based band Direct Message to create the song 'Rollercoaster: Hope as a Habit', which explores new approaches to testimony and human rights, and the experience of Ukrainians refugees in York (UK). 
Type Of Art Performance (Music, Dance, Drama, etc) 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/songs-of-hope-and-joy
 
Title The Urgency of Erasing: Archive of Graphic Protest in Public Space 
Description As part of the Commissioning call on Testimony, 'The Urgency of Erasing' documents protest graffiti in Mexico from 2019-2024, focusing on their role in preserving the memory of public dissent against violence and government inaction, particularly regarding femicide and human rights violations. The project comprises two main components: a collective archive and public projections of protest messages. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/la-urgencia-de-borrar
 
Title Viento, Andes 
Description As part of our Commissioning Call on Testimony, this project drawing on the stories of Andean women and uses the wind as a central theme to explore the complex realities of migration. The wind embodies movement, accompanies migration, and carries a bittersweet nostalgia-where the grief of leaving intertwines with the joy of journeying, finding collective solace in shared memories carried on the wind. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/viento
 
Title Young Voices 
Description As part of the Conversations with Testimony call, 'This Is Our Testimony' is a short film created by 2 groups of young people aged 8-14 who live in York (UK). The piece is an accumulation of 10 weeks' worth of exploration around the subject of testimony made in collaboration with Bolshee, dogeatcog, Katie Lou McCabe and Young Thugs and supported by Arts Rights Truth. Together the young creatives explored spoken word, visual art, light projection, soundscapes and verbatim interviews as ways to express their honest opinions about what it is like to be a young person in 2024 and what their demands are for a fairer future. 
Type Of Art Film/Video/Animation 
Year Produced 2024 
Impact N/A 
URL https://artrightstruth.com/young-voices
 
Description Our approach to impact has evolved from an initial focus on working with artists and activists, individually and collectively, to working with two particular organisations - Amnesty International and CIVICUS. With both, we are exploring the ways in which the arts can add value to their work - through targeted commissioning calls - with a particular focus on moving beyond conventional means of linking the arts to activism e.g. in realist forms, to engage new audiences, etc..
First Year Of Impact 2024
Sector Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
 
Description Collaboration with Amnesty International 
Organisation Amnesty International
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution The Art Rights Truth team have worked with Amnesty International to commission 9 artist/activist commentaries on a report about the right to protest in Europe ('Under Protected and Over Restricted: The State of the Right to Protest in 21 European Countries', July 2024). The resulting art work will be used for research, exhibitions and outreach, and advocacy.
Collaborator Contribution Amnesty International wrote the report; supported dissemination of the commissioning call; tool part in the selection process; and will participate in organising exhibitions, outreach and advocacy.
Impact It is too early to detail outputs or outcomes. It is multidisciplinary - law, politics, art history, cultural studies.
Start Year 2024
 
Description Blog series 
Form Of Engagement Activity Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Third sector organisations
Results and Impact Blog series, intended to communicate research findings on an ongoing basis in an accessible way
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023,2024
URL https://artrightstruth.com/publications
 
Description Bodies on the Line public event 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact 'Bodies on the Line' was a multi-media event held in the Guildhall, York, on 6 October 2023 (5-7pm). It combined video art and other exhibitions; a live dance performance; and a panel discussion about bodies in the context of the right to protest.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://artrightstruth.com/news
 
Description Conference 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Third sector organisations
Results and Impact Conference titled 'Nature as the Subject of Pain', took place in Bogota, Colombia, 31 October to 1 November 2024. The event brought together artists, activists and academics to discuss the role of nature in conflict, not as a backdrop to violence but as itself a subject of pain.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
URL https://cienciassociales.uniandes.edu.co/antropologia/convocatoria/iv-encuentro-internacional-deestu...
 
Description Project launch event 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Launch event, particularly focused on arts and activist practitioners locally
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://artrightstruth.com/news/blog-post-title-two-2l39t
 
Description Project website 
Form Of Engagement Activity Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact Website, designed to be outward facing communication for the project, documenting commissions, activities and events, etc.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023,2024
URL https://artrightstruth.com/