The sound of the spoken word rising, pausing, the rhythms of the lines, of the stanzas, of the silences, the poem verbalised. The images etched on the walls in black and white, comics, graphic novels, stretching across wall after wall, winding around the room. The feel of cloth under fingers running across soft folds of a deep-red, imprinted justice photomontage. Weaving together international law, academic analysis, the political, the artistic, and the sensory experience of sight, sound, and touch—this was the extraordinary launch of Christine Schwöbel-Patel and Robert Knox’s edited volume and accompanying exhibition, Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Justice, on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2024.

Engagement with justice, and injustice, as material, cultural, and artistic expression is not new. Visual and non-visual works and practices have long been vehicles for the exploration of the human condition, stories of pain and power, injustice, violence, abuse, oppression, political repression, atrocities; stories of human suffering told through artworks and experienced through aesthetic encounter. However, recognition by international lawyers of this mode of engagement as a direct statement of, and enquiry into, international law is a more recent development. It has manifested as part of a more experimental approach to exploring the experience of international law. Examples of this found form in Philippe Sands’ 2014 performance work, East West Street: A Song of Good and Evil.^[1] Also in Sofia Stolk and Renke Vos’ blog, Legal Sightseeing, and its multilayered engagement with international legal architecture, spaces, images, and encounter.^[2] It can be experienced in Amanda Perry-Kessaris’ Pop-Up Museum of Law’s Objects.^[3] And yet another iteration is artist’s Taryn Simon’s exhibition, Paperwork and the Will of Capital, as commentary on the signing of treaties channelled through their flower arrangements.^[4] Critical legal theorists have also been working with the role of image and object in international law over the last decade, drawing attention to the myths and narratives manifesting in its visuality and materiality.^[5] Schwöbel-Patel and Knox’s remarkable edited volume and curated exhibition operates in this space, expanding its parameters, combining critical legal approaches with express political statement and physical experience.

The multiple layers of meaning of ‘aesthetic’ are engaged in Schwöbel-Patel and Knox’s exploration of the aesthetic of international justice and international law. Dominant aesthetic and counter-aesthetic as politics. Aesthetics as sensory experience—visual appreciation, sound, touch, taste, smell. Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, theories on beauty and art. The nuance and possibilities of the terms are embraced in this volume. The contributions are published in print form, preserved for repeated reading in the volume, but the aural form of several pieces is also to be experienced. The rhythms of the poetry of Jo Frank’s ‘Violence’, the sound of it spoken when performed by the author at the launch, attests to the additional deeply meaningful layer of its performed iteration. As was also evident in the internal consistency, rhythms, and repetition of model, structure, and message of each of Gerry Simpson’s parables, ‘When Eichmann Couldn’t Laugh: Fifteen One-Minute Parables’, individually read aloud at the launch as if a series of fireside stories, lessons for the naive international lawyer. Aroma of coffee filled the room. Discussions continued over shared plates of food eaten together in a space interrogating justice, injustice, and the failures of law. One aspect of the visual aesthetic in the collection is international law and justice delivered through comic and graphic novel. Both are brought into play in the interviews with Carolina Alonso Bejarano and Peter Quach, ‘Pinan: Comics and International Justice’, and Kate Evans, ‘Alternative Superheroes’. As a format, the transcript of the interviews allows us to hear the author/artist voices as they speak about their works, which are pictured in the volume. At the launch, that visual representation was on a large scale, filling the walls with the images, telling their stories frame by frame. Object also has a place in this meditation on international justice—Terry Duffy’s ‘The International Justice Robe’ is a ‘thing’, an object, an artwork, its physical presence at the exhibition imprinted on the pages in the volume in photographs. At the launch, it was available to touch, to wear, to watch it move as the wearer moved.  

Schwöbel-Patel and Knox have brought multiple forms together. In so doing, they are not only taking the enquiry out of the international lawyer’s more usual page and text and print mode, which others have also done, but they are combining the multiplicity of form in one space, and alongside and embedded within more traditional academic legal analysis. It is an approach that produces interesting juxtapositions, locations for analysis, and interplay of discourse. The launch succeeded in combining these aspects, experienced by those attending as a profoundly moving moment. There is, however, an omission. It is a deliberate one. The focus for the editors was directed elsewhere than paintings and sculpture (p.3–4; see also references on pp.144–153). I wondered at this conscious decision to omit whole sections of representation, as if politics, protest, subversiveness, and resistance do not have the capacity to be imbued through all art forms. I wondered at the constraint and limitations this placed on the scope of the book. That conscious decision, however, allowed space for the exploration of aesthetic forms not often associated with international law and justice, that of parable, comic, and screenplay. In a strikingly successful study of shape and mode and method of delivery, this collection created a place for innovation and experiment. It seemed this could be ‘Volume I’ of a series rather than a singular project. So, with that in mind then, I reflected on the aesthetic representation of international justice within and across cultures and nations that engages so many forms, including painting and sculpture,^[6] as well as forms that are also not analysed in the book. Forms such as Kā Huru Manu, Ngāi Tahu’s cultural mapping project in Aotearoa,^[7] or ‘aesthetic activism’ through dance seeking international justice on feminism and climate change,^[8] or the Community Truth-Telling initiatives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and artworks of the Tjanpi desert weavers,^[9] or the protests against colonialism and the visual stereotyping of Pasifika women contained in the video art of Pasifika artist Angela Tiatia,^[10] forms that are not given form in this collection. There are so many cultural forms of aesthetics and counter-aesthetics of international justice that could provide interesting dimensions to this enquiry, that could have had representation in this book. Perhaps, that means there is space for a future Volume II. There is also a significant omission in the list of contributors—the contributions to this edited volume, both artistic and academic, are largely dominated by those based at institutions in the Global North. There is a sense of missed opportunities here. Perhaps, that means there is space for a future Volume II.

There are many examples of artworks operating as expressions of protest, anguish, critique at international injustice. As objects operating as both artistic statement and creator of legal meaning, there are innate tensions within the frame of the artwork, within the subject matter, amongst political objectives outside the frame, and in reconfiguring what is meant by justice in international law. In this vein, an artwork can be realised as a visual statement of international law, often projecting a flawed, ineffective, captured international law, seeking a reconstructed international law, seeking a different form of international justice. Collectively and individually, the contributions, pieces, objects, works, events in this collaboration by Schwöbel-Patel and Knox involve the encounter of international law and justice with its aesthetic experience. This invites reflection on the construction and representation of international justice, the implications, the histories, the ‘now’, the stories, the influence, and the way in which the aesthetic of justice creates meaning. It is a conversation—one in which we are asked to engage, to participate, to observe, to be observed, the lawyer, the artist, the scholar, the protester, the resistance, the creativity—and one that asks: who creates? We are invited to contemplate who creates; whose international justice is legitimised by, and categorised as, ‘official international justice’, in itself a process of judging. The visual practices of the institutional justice of the International Criminal Court and of treaty frameworks for the ‘asylum-seeker’, the ‘refugee’, are interrogated. The constructed aesthetic of ‘victimhood’ in ‘official international justice’ is deconstructed. The counter-aesthetic in the second half of the book is offered in response. This volume situates the experience of international law and justice within an understanding of political, economic, and legal systems as mechanisms of control. And it also does this through the experimentation of delivery.

What we have in this extraordinary book and exhibition is a collection of those interactions, experiments seeking to explore the recalibration of our relationship with international law and justice. Achieved not only through engagement with those ideas and analysis, but also through the methods of delivery. The experimentation of the delivery of statements of international law and justice through a range of media, an array of forms, and the experimentation of the act of legal analysis, in itself manifesting in the project through a multiplicity of forms of engagement. Examining the visuality in international law’s projection of itself, of victimhood, violence, display, spectacle, ownership, narrative/aesthetic, counter-narrative/counter-aesthetic. International law’s framing of itself; its essentialising, reinforcing, and reducing of complexity in its search for an image to project, and at the same time, perpetuating injustice. And ultimately requiring us to explore the very forms in which international law and justice are made, produced, received, turned over, participated, experienced, analysed. The launch of this book and exhibition was a profoundly moving afternoon and evening. Then repeatedly relived through the book. This has the sense of a beginning of a collaboration for Schwöbel-Patel and Knox and the contributors to this volume rather than an endpoint. I have no doubt that these conversations will continue in many and unexpected forms—and I also have no doubt that experiencing the next chapter of that shared exploration will be just as exhilarating as this one.

^[1] Philippe Sands, East West Street: A Song of Good and Evil (2014), premiere performance 29 November 2014, Southbank Centre, London.

^[2] Sofia Stolk and Renke Vos, Legal Sightseeing, <https://legalsightseeing.wordpress.com/over/> accessed 8 April 2025. 

^[3] Amanda Perry-Kessaris, ‘The Pop-Up Museum of Legal Objects Project: An Experiment in Socio-Legal Design’ 68 (2017) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 225.

^[4] Taryn Simon, Paperwork and the Will of Capital, first installation, Venice Biennale 56^th International Art Exhibition, Arsenale, Venice, Italy 9 May-22 November 2015.

^[5] See, for example, Daniel Joyce, Photography and the Image-Making of International Justice’ 4 (2010) Law and Humanities 229; Luis Eslava, ‘Istanbul Vignettes: Observing the Everyday Operation of International Law’ 2 (2014) London Review of International Law 3; Christine Schwöbel-Patel, ‘Spectacle in International Criminal Law: the Fundraising Image of Victimhood’ 4 (2016) London Review of International Law247; Maria Elander, ‘Visualizing Law and Justice at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’ (2020) 114 AJIL Unbound 128; Jessie Hohman and Daniel Joyce (eds), International Law’s Objects (Oxford University Press, 2018); I began presenting on the role of image and international law in 2015, publishing on this in Hohmann and Joyce’s International Law’s Objects and in the London Review of International Law.

^[6] See, for example, the painting, installation, and performance art of Rummana Hussain, protesting violence against women and Muslim minorities, consciously combining art, activism, and feminist theory; see Judith Mason, The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent, known as The Blue Dress (1998), which hangs in the Constitutional Court of South Africa, as a commentary on international human rights, apartheid, sexual violence against women, and the failure of international law to prevent such crimes; see the work of Sajitha Shankar, on feminism and protesting violence against women, for example, Darkness at Noon (1996) and Alterbodies #7 (2007); see the sculpture of Séra, Cambodian Tragedy Memorial (A ceux qui ne sont plus là (For those who are no longer here)) (2017), Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, a statement on crimes against humanity; see Gonçalo Mabunda, whose sculpture explicitly engages in political activism and addresses themes of armed conflict, peace, reconciliation.

^[7]  Kā Huru Manu, Ngāi Tahu Cultural Mapping Project, <https://kahurumanu.co.nz> accessed 8 April 2025.   

^[8] Sherry Badger Shapiro, ‘Dance as Activism: The Power to Envision, Move and Change’ (2016) 4 Dance Research Aotearoa 3; Arzucan Askin, ‘Using the Power of Dance to Address Climate Change’, TEDxLSE, TEDxTalks, 10 June 2019, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iWtqnaklWg> accessed 8 April 2025. 

^[9] ANTaR (Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation), ‘Community Truth-Telling, such as ‘Place Reclaiming’, <https://antar.org.au/issues/truth-telling/community-truth-telling/> accessed 8 April 2025; or the artworks, and cultural processes of their creation, of the Tjanpi desert weavers, <https://tjanpi.com.au/> and their support through the Ngaanyatjarra Pitijantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, <https://www.npywc.org.au/> accessed 8 April 2025.   

^[10] Angela Tiatia, artist <https://www.angelatiatia.com/> accessed 8 April 2025.