Pooja Dhingra, an independent conceptualiser, graphic designer, art director and the founder of Compassion Contagion reflects on her experience running Rafooghar- a community space* where stitching stories serves as a soft yet powerful way to resist daily injustices and reclaim everyday freedoms for women living in marginalised communities.

Artist Stephen Lee Hodgkins reflects on what he learned about the future of care through conversations and doodling with York residents; he points out five fundamental principles that could guide care provision in the UK, so that it is embedded with hope and human rights. This blog was originally published on Stephen’s website and has been reproduced here with permission from the artist.

Time is intimately linked to the exercise and experience of human rights and social justice. The linear way we measure time, and the constant erosion of contemplative space, are not conducive to recognising and holding space for the messiness of human experience of abuse, justice, and redress. In this blog, Tallulah Lines reflects on how the arts could unfix our notion of time to help approach these issues, drawing on interviews carried out with artists for Art Rights Truth.

Fundamental human rights documents have many virtues, but a poetic turn of phrase is rarely among them. Here, Brian Phillips analyses the practice of Anishinaabe artist Barry Ace to argue that through arts-based consciousness raising and collaborative creation, it is possible for human rights standards to find compelling new lives as works of art.

Even though human rights are more necessary than ever, there is a reluctance among artists creating socially engaged art to use the term. In this blog, Paul Gready considers why this might be.

ART team member Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar reflects on the ethics of collaboration during the research process.

In this blog, ART researchers Paul Gready and Ron Dudai reflect on the interviews they carried out with human rights organisations in Israel, and the value-added that art can provide to traditional human rights campaigning.

En este blog, Sören Molano-Cajamarca describe su experiencia de asistir a una lectura ritual y argumenta que es una forma de dar un registro visible y auditivo a lo irrecuperable y la trascendencia del dolor.

In this piece, Tallulah Lines is inspired by US artist Rashaad Newsome’s short film Build or Destroy to think about the role of joy in art and human rights. She argues that art can help bring to life theoretical concepts like Black Joy or Decolonial Joy, that may inspire new ways of thinking about human rights.

In this post, Rafael Quintero narrates his experience of joining Arhuaco elders and members of the Colombian Truth Commission as they ‘weave words’ in a ritual reading of part of the Truth Commission’s report. This post is translated and abridged; see the original article in Spanish here.

For victims and witnesses of abuses, the lingua franca of the human rights practitioner can sometimes feel distant, remote, stubbornly immaterial. In this blog, Brian Phillips argues that artists can help re-centre the human body and the realm of the everyday in human rights practice.

A criticism levelled at Documenta 15 by some arts professionals is that there isn’t enough art. In this blog, Helen Pheby argues that that depends on how we conceptualise art, and how we see its role in society.

In this blog, Ana Bilbao asks what we can learn from an artwork beyond it being good or bad or resulting in positive or negative behaviour, arguing that art can help us engage with human rights in novel ways and offer us a pathway to work and think together.

Emilie Flower responds to criticisms that Documenta Fifteen focussed too heavily on ‘NGO art’, arguing that this dismissive accusation merits further enquiry, to understand how Indonesian curators ruangrupa embrace collectivity in their work.