The Art and Politics of Imagination: Remembering Mass Violence against Women

This paper addresses the topical role of artistic memory in the work of redress from political repression and historical injustices by focusing on the ways in which memory and imagination slip into one another resisting the violence against women. The argument I intend to put forth is that artistic memory work can foster collective memory and collective representations of the traumatic past which overcome the traditional individual representations. To this end, this paper aims to explore various instances of contemporary art productions which deal with the memorialization of violence against women in armed conflicts and political repression. The traditional preference in legal tradition for individual memory in reestablishing justice (the traditional rules of evidence in transitional justice focus on individual memory) offers less space for collective representations and collective memory. However, as legal scholars (Osiel 1999, Lopez 2015) posit, the judicial system should also consider collective memory in the context of transitional justice. By examining artistic memory work which deals with violence against women, this paper will illuminate the great potential of artistic practice to convey an active remembrance of the painful past which facilitates the encountering between individual and collective memory, as well as witness and post-witness representations. At the same time, this paper attempts to highlight the connection between memory and imagination in artistic work which ensures a commitment to remember the past in the light of the “never again”. In this light, imagination is not memory’s opposite but a tool that opposes further injustices and collective oblivion. Through imaginative practices the distant witnesses acquire a certain type of experiential knowledge. Therefore, the artistic memory work discussed in this paper does not just transmit information (“this happened there”) but allows the viewer to experience imaginatively “what it is like to be this or that in that situation”.