More than 100 years have passed since 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Ottoman Turks because of their identity. More than 70 years have gone by since 6 million Jewish victims were murdered by Nazi German perpetrators. And to this day groups of people continue to be targeted for persecution and destruction because of their identities. From the dictatorships of Latin America to the killing fields of Cambodia, from Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s to Myanmar today, identity-based violence continues to serve as a political tool for perpetrator regimes, who marginalize and brutalize victim groups to stoke fear and secure power.
Across these many cases of identity-based violence, however, groups of individuals inevitably emerge to respond to the politics of destruction with a politics of hope. Time and again, activist collectives have used their voices, bodies, and creativity to counter the divisiveness of genocidal regimes, often turning to the arts as a key tool in their struggle for social transformation. In these cases, the visual and performing arts are a means for generating public support for the cause of equal rights and recognition.
Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor writes, “Artivists (artist-activists) use performance to intervene in political contexts, struggles, and debates.” Artivism: The Atrocity Prevention Pavilion highlights the work of six artists and art collectives who have used the arts as an instrument for responding to identity-based violence and its continuing effects across six different cases of genocide and other mass atrocities. Each of these works comes from a different post-atrocity context, each representing a different region of the world: Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Indonesia, Iraqi Kurdistan, and South Africa. Each of these projects responds to the specific historical and political realities that shape these six very different cases. What ties them all together, however, is the way in which they each call on the power of art to push societies to confront the enduring realities of past violence. They advocate for a world in which the human rights of all individuals are respected—where no one need feel threatened because of her or his identity. In other words, these artivists envision a world without genocide and other mass atrocities. In the process, these artivist projects demonstrate that the important work of recognizing and preventing mass violence is not only the purview of those within the halls of traditional power—it is a project in which we all can take part.