Description: In the aftermath of mass conflict how is it possible to address violent and traumatic pasts, reconcile divided nations, and strengthen state institutions? This study explores the connections between transitional justice and visual art in order to answer that question. Garnsey argues that art can engage and shape ideas of justice. Art can be an inquiry into, and an alternative experience of, justice. Art embeds justice on different political levels - both local and global. Art becomes a radical form of political participation in times of transition. Arising out of extensive fieldwork at the Constitutional Court of South Africa and the South Africa Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which included 130 interviews with key decision makers, the book provides the first substantive theoretical framework for understanding transitional justice and visual art, and develops novel conceptions of visual jurisprudence and cultural diplomacy as forms of transitional justice.
Brief description: Eliza Garnsey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in International Relations at the University of Cambridge and is Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge. She was previously awarded the 2017 Lisa Smirl Ph.D. Prize for best thesis in Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge.
Review Quotes: 'In this pioneering interdisciplinary book, Eliza Garnsey offers a compelling account of the complex and productive relationship between visual art and transitional justice. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South African Constitutional Court and at the Venice Biennale, she shows both how the South African state has attempted to mobilise art as an instrument of cultural diplomacy and how art often escapes efforts to harness it, instead opening up new dimensions of experience and novel sources of political and ethical insight.' Duncan Bell, University of Cambridge