Politics of Representation: Art and Human Rights

Abstract

The migration of images from public space (the street, protests or newspapers) to art spaces has been a recurring phenomenon in Latin American post-dictatorship art. This essay reflects on that process of migration in a series of contemporary art projects, analyzing how new and latent meanings of such images are re-activated and re-circulated through their translation to the register of art. When politically iconic images associated with political repression—such as identification photos of the disappeared used by human rights organizations as proof of the lives they reclaim and commemorate—are translated into the art field, they are connected to the power of the incomplete and undetermined that art makes possible. This in turn may grant stagnant historical documents another political and aesthetic life.