Art and Rights
The incorporation of culture into the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (as ‘the right freely to participate in cultural life of the community’ and ‘the right to enjoy protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any […] artistic production’) reflected a longstanding entanglement of creative production with legal thinking that has not abated. If anything, a right-based approach to culture has become ever further cemented in the conception of how works of art come into being, are disseminated, collected and preserved.
This panel investigates not only how art making is shaped now and in the past by rights but how the discipline of art history itself has internalised many right-based principles, such as those determining questions of authorship, expression, reproducibility and inheritability. Art and rights have each been commonly considered universal, human phenomena. However, thinking about them together quickly reveals their co-dependencies, either on other rights or on social institutions. Even the mere two cultural rights specified in the UDHR can be at odds with each other.
Themes for discussion include conflict between cultural and other rights, changing conceptions of their universality or relativity, and the centrality or marginality of art to rights in general. This panel is interested in the analysis of forms of artistic expression emerging as modes of prefigurative human rights practice and artistic practices dedicated to exploring the rights of nature.
Session Convenors:
Ana Bilbao Yarto, University of York
Jonathan Cane, University of Warwick
Michael White, University of York
Speakers:
Emma Barker, The Open University
Eighteenth-Century Art and the Claims of Humanity
In Inventing Human Rights (2007), the historian Lynn Hunt traces the origin of such rights back to the eighteenth century when they were first claimed as natural, equal and universal. A central aim of Hunt’s book is to explain how people living in a society marked by profound inequalities could have embraced a conception of a common humanity endowed with equal rights. She argues that a crucial contribution was made by novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), which encouraged readers to identify with the suffering and the struggles of ordinary men and (especially) women. Hunt also suggests that ‘viewing pictures in public exhibitions’ (p. 32) could have a similar effect but offers only a few relatively brief comments about portraiture to support this claim. This paper aims therefore to assess how far paintings and prints of the later eighteenth century served to promote a conception of shared humanity and, with it, a culture of human rights. Taking the domestic tableaux exhibited by Jean-Baptiste Greuze in the Paris Salons of the 1760s as a starting point, it will examine the use of similar imagery to engender solidarity with a persecuted minority in the case of a French Protestant, Jean Calas, who had been executed for a crime he did not commit. The paper will also explore the limits to this conception of shared humanity with reference to representations of other categories of victim, such as the prisoner, the poor child and, of course, the enslaved.
Daniel Rathbone, University of Warwick
Resistance and Creativity: The People’s Parks in Oukasie
Looking at the People’s Parks as they developed in the township of Oukasie, South Africa, during the mid-1980s, this paper will explore how creative communal projects informed an articulation of human rights in the face of state oppression. The People’s Parks were a grassroots phenomenon of place-making that saw young people and youth groups in urban townships come together to occupy and develop unused land: creating rock gardens, sculptures and public spaces. They were both a creative and political exercise, drawing on processes of public artistic practice and the politics of the anti-apartheid struggle. In the case of Oukasie, this was connected to the resistance of the forceful relocation of residents to the newly built township of Lethlabile in the then ‘independent’ homeland of Bophuthatswana. The creation of these parks thus formed part of the protest action led by various civic organisations, notably youth groups. The intersection of public art and protest thus highlights how communities asserted their sense of belonging in the face of violent dispossession. By examining photographs of these park, the paper will explore the ways the creative nature of these sites asserted a right to expression and community, and how this is located in the broader struggle for human rights against apartheid.
Xiaojue Michelle Zhu, The Courtauld
Copyright Meets Reproductive Rights: Käthe Kollwitz and the Abortion Rights Movement in Weimar Germany
This paper explores the roles of copyright in activist art by examining reproductions and appropriations of Käthe Kollwitz’s works during the abortion rights movement in the final years of the Weimar Republic. Kollwitz only directly voiced support for repealing the law criminalising abortion on a few occasions in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, her works depicting destitute proletarian mothers proliferated during the height of the abortion rights movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s, appearing in books, theatre pamphlets and even reproductive health brochures, usually without the artist’s involvement. By analysing selected cases in relation to copyright (Urheberrecht) laws at the time, I examine the legal infrastructure that facilitated the appropriations of Kollwitz’s works. Moreover, by considering Kollwitz’s support for abortion rights, her previous collaboration with publishers and her process of making facsimiles as an activist working primarily in printmaking, I explore the implications when defending her copyright as an author (Urheber) were at odds with her effort to contribute to social justice and women’s reproductive rights. I intend to show that the proliferation of Kollwitz’s works during the abortion rights movement was due to copyright laws that were relatively lenient towards unauthorised reproductions. These reproductions, in turn, contributed to Kollwitz’s fame and her works’ timeliness by capitalising on their narrative possibilities. This paper argues that Kollwitz’s acquiescence demonstrates that, ultimately, the role of art in advancing reproductive justice took precedence over copyright concerns for the artist, who prioritised reproducibility and accessibility over originality in her practice.
Asha Jyothi, independent scholar
Indigenous Genius: Leveraging Intellectual Property Regimes to Honour
Artistic Commons and Community Rights of Tribes in India and elsewhere For Indigenous communities, “the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community”, according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is often truncated owing to inadequate protections afforded to their cultural productions, including art. Such protection is also a universal right, and it often takes the form of individual copyrights under Intellectual Property (IP) laws. This can be problematic for Indigenous communities that believe in communally shared rights and practices. How can Indigenous communities navigate this contradiction to ensure that individuals receive rights for artistic productions while simultaneously safeguarding common/community assets and resources? This is the primary question I seek to explore. In order to achieve this dualistic activation of agency, I refer to the lives and careers of two pioneers of Indian art, Jangarh Singh Shyam and J. Swaminathan, focusing on the dialectic resolution of the need to prove one’s individual artistic genius according to hegemonic Western traditions in order to be ‘taken seriously’ in the marketplace as well as the ethical imperative to recognize sociocultural inheritances borrowed or received from contextual/situated indigenous lifestyles. I also refer to other productive movements in allied spaces such as geographical information tagging to identify artistic lineage and honour claims of attribution, and lessons from digital archives to protect traditional medicinal knowledge from unethical or misinformed patent claims to examine tensions between the individual and the common. I end with an overview of potential pathways in which IP systems can work for Indigenous communities notwithstanding their historical impulse.
Jonathan Cane, University of Warwick & Andre Prado Fernandes, independent scholar
Visualising Indigenous Rights in the Brazilian Amazon
This paper is a preliminary analysis of recently digitised archival drawings by the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous people, held at the Casa da Cultura do Urubuí archives in the Amazonian village of Presidente Figueiredo. The approximately 4000 drawings are almost totally unstudied and were the result of radical Marxist-Freirean activists in the 1980s working with the Waimiri-Atroari to co-learn their language and visual culture. Using Paulo Freire’s ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ as a method, Egydio Schwade, a philosopher, activist and theologian, facilitated the making of these remarkable drawings of forest life after massacres by the Brazilian dictatorship. The building of the BR-174 highway through the Amazon resulted in displacement, genocide, biodiversity loss, and deforestation. As part of a larger project on the intersection of human and nature rights and the visuality of Amazonian deforestation, this presentation will interpret a selection of the pencil drawings which record the territory, forest, birds, plants, insiders/outsiders and the state.
Ksenia Lavrenteva, University of Exeter
Cultural Rights in the Digital Age: Conflicts, Exclusions, and Artistic Practices
This study examines the tensions surrounding the right to access culture, particularly in the digital realm, and how they influence artistic production. Through legal analysis, the research explores the conflict between cultural entitlements—such as the right to develop, share, and benefit from cultural knowledge and heritage—and exclusions justified by intellectual property protections and Indigenous peoples’ rights to control access to their sacred sites and cultural objects. The research draws on two case studies: Other Nefertiti and the Princess of Ukok (Siberian Ice Maiden). The Other Nefertiti project demonstrates how unrestricted access to a 3D model of the Nefertiti bust, through artistic intervention, embodied the right to cultural access but excluded Egyptians from the decision-making process, disregarding their repatriation claims and cultural rights. In contrast, the Princess of Ukok case shows an attempt to balance access to cultural heritage with Indigenous rights, where physical access to the mummy is partly restricted, yet digital representations remain widely accessible. This has led to artistic uses, including tattoos and AI-generated images, violating the rights of Indigenous peoples. Both cases reveal how digital access, while offering new opportunities for cultural dissemination and artistic production, excludes those without access to technology and resources. They also highlight the intersection of cultural rights with socio-economic and ownership rights. The findings underscore contradictions within the human rights framework, showing how the digital environment often perpetuates inequalities, neglects collective cultural rights, and reinforces power imbalances in artistic production