Art and humanitarian: looking

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Three Arguments For (And Against) an Aesthetic of Suffering by Dominique Laleg

The paper explores how aesthetic mediation of human suffering relates to humanitarianism. What are the contemporary ramifications of this question and what criticisms has aesthetics to face today?

Toward a collaborative ethic of humanitarian cultural work by Marc Herbst

In this talk, Marc Herbst looks at the entanglement of the concept of contemporary art in disassociated systems that allow for what we identify as humanitarian crisis. It then points out ways in which artistic and culture work against such dissociation from both the distanced perspective (as an ‘audience’) and also from within crisis situations.

Why a Chair? Artistic Gestures as Acts of Memory and Reconstruction by Dr. Isabelle de le Court

This paper examines how chairs as part of artistic interventions – by Daniel Berset, Doris Salcedo, Haris Pašović and Nada Sehnaoui – act as a metaphor of absence and memory in the process of social and physical reconstruction and mediate disruptive events experienced by the population of a neighbourhood, a city or a country. The chair embodies the absence, the invisible people and at the same time the social and human connection through the act of remembering collectively.