Description
Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum and refugees is widely criticised by the international community as violating international human rights and humanitarian laws and norms. In the absence of state protection, artistic representation becomes an important intervention into the practices and narratives surrounding Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.
In this paper, I explore Hoda Afshar’s video artwork Remain (2018) which documents the experiences and struggles of a group of stateless men who have been left to languish on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, after the Australian government closed its Manus Regional Processing Centre in 2017. Remain is one of the only available avenues open to the men to share their stories and to communicate the harm caused by national policy and practices. I argue that the artistic representation of Remain becomes a crucial form of political representation; political representation which would not otherwise be possible.
Keywords: Human rights, art, Australia, political representation, refugees.
Bio: Eliza Garnsey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in International Relations at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on art and visual culture in international relations and world politics, particularly in relation to human rights, transitional justice, and conflict.
