Abstract
This essay examines different aesthetic strategies taken by creatives in representing and repairing broken pasts as well as imagining alternative futures. Employing visual analysis informed by conversations with visual artists, legal practitioners and social justice advocates in Nairobi, Kenya and Bogotá, Colombia, it highlights three different, yet interconnecting, sets of aesthetic and symbolic strategies ranging from witnessing, to the manipulation of silences or incomplete pasts, to performative and embodied ways of imagining not just the past but also the future. The first section, entitled ‘Bearing Witness’, brings together the work of photojournalists Jesús Abad Colorado (Colombia) and Boniface Mwangi (Kenya) to explore the role of artists in documenting historical moments of instrumental violence as well as the exhibition of these graphic images in public spaces. The second section, ‘Expanding Imagination’, discusses the work of Juan Manuel Echavarría (Colombia) and installation artist Wambui Wamae Kamiru Collymore (Kenya), showing how they seek to add narrative layers to combat entrenched official narratives by inviting audiences to engage with the complexities of the past through and beyond identity politics. The third section on ‘Embodied Transformation’ engages the work of sculptor Doris Salcedo (Colombia) in comparison with live art and multimedia artist Syowia Kyambi (Kenya), to explore how artists transform remnants of the past, evoking new possibilities.
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