84. Sights of Abolition: Art Against Borders, Militarism, and Incarceration
Where discussions about abolition within the arts have primarily focused on prisons (often from a North American perspective), this panel asks what it would mean to also bring an abolitionist lens to detention centres, borders, and military sites, both within the UK and across other geographies.
As Michelle Brown (2013) observes, “we live our lives amid complex, but often fleeting, anecdotal appearances of the penal, even as punishment emerges as a structuring force in globalising frameworks.” Abolition, then, must contend not only with institutions but with embedded ways of seeing, sensing, and organizing lifeways. Drawing on abolition studies and art history, this panel adopts an expansive understanding of abolition—from visual records of the concrete struggles for decarceration and demilitarization to the work of artists who engage in the speculative work of imagining a world beyond the state violence of prisons, borders, military networks, surveillance, and policing.
We invite submissions from artists, curators, and scholars who are engaging with abolition as creation. If we have been taught to “see like a cop,” how can artworks help us see otherwise? What material, social, and affective transformations does abolition promise and require and what is the role of the arts in these transformations? What do ethical and meaningful futures for former spaces of incarceration look like? Topics could include: visual cultures of decarceration and demilitarization; documentary and fictional portrayals of the resistance to prisons, jails, detention centres, or nuclear sites; and artistic engagements with concepts of justice and safety beyond incarceration and borders.
Themes: contemporary art, abolition, borders
Lead Convenor: Alexandra Moore, University of California, United States
Co-convenors: Mirra-Margarita Ianeva, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and comlpete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.