Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 8, Issue 1-2, 2016

A photo exhibition My Body: A War Zone features the portraits and testimonies of women survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nepal, Colombia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The exhibition aims to bring attention to individual stories in an effort to overcome the silence and stigma associated with CRSV. This article will analyse this transnational project that brings four acclaimed photographers from different parts of the globe to reconstruct women’s images and testimonies in public city spaces. The article will focus on the Bosnian and Nepali parts of the photo exhibition, and will draw on fieldwork and interviews with Velma Šarić, the curator and organizer of the Bosnian exhibitions, and NayanTara, an independent photographer and curator based in Kathmandu, Nepal. The article argues that while art cannot replace formal judicial mechanisms or material reparation, grassroots artistic initiatives may offer significant and distinct reparative contributions to transitional justice processes.

In this article we draw on data from a co-produced transdisciplinary arts and language practice and research project. In this project, researchers, artists and creative practitioners worked with refugees and people seeking asylum. Together we developed and led arts-based workshops, which aimed to explore what it means to be ‘welcome’, how we ‘welcome’ and how we want to be ‘welcomed’. As researchers we approached the project from different disciplinary spaces: Sam from applied theatre and Jessica from sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. Through analysis of our co-produced artistic outputs, through ethnographic writing and through our reflections on the processes of collaborating, we consider how arts practices engage with narratives of migration in refugee communities. We take three elements of the project: visual arts products in the form of silk paintings, community voices in the form of vignettes and media documentation in the form of a project film. We suggest how these examples embody the processes and the community developed around the project and the different ways of working across sectors with displaced communities to engage with and enable spaces for voices to be made audible.

We use ‘refugee’ throughout this article to refer to people who have been granted asylum, people who are in the process of granting asylum, and people whose asylum claims have been rejected. We choose not to use the phrase ‘asylum seekers’ due to its often negative connotations in the British press.

Ethnic minority artists are often entrapped in cultural spaces that define their representation as ‘marginal’ and limit their visibility and reach. The challenge facing minority artists – like Muslim, Arab or South-Asian American artists, to name a few – lies in creating spaces that would free their plays from being demarcated as ‘marginal’ or ‘subaltern’, and attract a wider audience to view and engage with their issues and concerns. Ethnic theatre initiatives are actively interacting with the wider community to change such narrative by creating new spaces for the distribution of their art, and imbedding civic engagement in the mosaic of that art. This article investigates a new socially-engaged discourse being developed by companies like Silk Road Rising (SRR) in Chicago, whose artists are disseminating their work to new virtual audiences in digital ‘counterpublics’. In particular, the article focuses on the company’s recent direction to harness the online public sphere in the making and distribution of artistic works to challenge cultural, political and institutional limitations. SRR is benefiting from and harnessing new technologies to: firstly, make its projects visible and accessible to a wider audience; secondly, engage its audiences in a participatory process that would effectively render them as ‘spect-actors’; and thirdly, redefine the artistic output of ethnic artists as polycultural, rather than subaltern or marginal.

Performance-based processes can play a cultural role in interrogating socio-political and economic dimensions of conflict within communities. In this article, elements of Nhimbe/ilima performances are analysed and used to demonstrate how the cultural practice was appropriated into a theatre for development project addressing a conflict that was essentially a struggle for resources. This was achieved through creating artistic processes which used the Nhimbe/ilima practice within a sociopolitical and economic framework. In subjects such as peace building, it is essential to use the vast potential of performance to empower people with skills, to enable them to, and to create opportunities for them to practice conflict resolution. Peace building is hardly an abstract practice. Rather people learn to coexist and they can be empowered to do so by participating in performance based activity. Furthermore, peace building processes should also take into cognisance peoples’ indigenous knowledge systems and modes of communication so that interventions are meaningful and acceptable to them. The study also demonstrates how building upon people’s cultural heritage ensures continuity, fosters self-sufficiency and sustainability.

This article considers the dynamic relationship between Aboriginal Australia identity, western history and the recuperation of lost ancestral memories. In recent decades many Australian cultural institutions have supported Aboriginal community groups in the revival of Aboriginal languages, songs and stories. The reclamation of heritage from archival collections has helped strengthen Aboriginal claim and control of ancestor histories – especially when significant materials are returned to people of a descendant community and given meaningful social context. Often set in place from these interactions are cultural protocols and ethics formulating future material access, return and usage. Looking more closely at intercultural practices of repatriation, this article relates Aboriginal pathways of ancestral memory restoration (and invention of memory) to living story. In particular, it examines the cultural decision-making of two Australian Aboriginal family groups – Wirlomin Minang (Noongar) families from the Great Southern of Western Australia and Gunai Kurnai (Koorie) families from the Gippsland region of Victoria – who characterize kin reactions to the returned colonial historiography of their shared ancestor Bessy Flowers (c. 1849–95), as well as family grief and shame at her absent memory. The difference between the archival material of photographs and letters that represent Bessy and the ways her Wirlomin Minang and Gunai Kurnai families imagine themselves created context for the mixed-media co-production, No Longer a Wandering Spirit. This article explores how intercultural efforts to strengthen family story might widen circles of knowledge about Aboriginal cultural dislocation, historical exclusion and the ever-present action of resistance and recovery.

The human right to housing has a strange status in law, simultaneously codified in a number of international conventions and severely criticized, misunderstood or misinterpreted. This article considers two artistic views on the value of the human right to housing: Martha Rosler’s ‘If You Lived Here...’ and Casco’s recent projects on housing, gentrification and squatting, including the sitcom Our Autonomous Life? and the Convention on the Use of Space. I argue that examining the particular social contexts and the specific content of the claims made by these artists – notably the importance of housing to privacy, autonomy and freedom – illuminates a promising path forward for the right’s legal interpretation and protection.

This article will look at three case studies of performative political protest, where female activists are raising awareness of the precarious conditions of their lived experience in economic neo-liberalism. The research is focused on links between Focus E15 Mothers Group in London, the #protestiram movement in Macedonia and #direnkahkaha (resist laughter) in Turkey. I will analyse these protest movements’ performative acts and argue that these acts are strategically used to draw attention to the inequality faced by women.

The terms Comedy and Reconciliation cannot often be found together. Through the analyses of a theatre project, The Voice – A Day of an Unlucky Man, devised by ethnically segregated youth in Prijedor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article aims to investigate how comedy can encourage and effectively support a complex process of reconciliation. The framework for this analysis is shaped by comedy studies, theory of reconciliation and applied theatre practice.