2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) taking part in the conversation at all. 4 Yet, with this approach to statelessness in mind, I was curious to discover how artists sought to advocate for the elimination of statelessness through their artwork, as an alternative to the inaccessibility of the policy space. I was then taken aback that, in fact, Swaitat’s ‘lesson in this’ was not that at all. Rather than fighting to eradicate the ‘curse’ of statelessness, artists today are actively deconstructing and shifting the understandings of what it means to be stateless — resisting erasure rather than creating a movement shining a light on their invisibility. To underline the relevance of paying attention to statelessness in the arts, I will discuss my research with stateless art interlocutors, and show how I found them to use art to promote empathy for the issue. I refer to them as ‘art interlocutors’, a term coined by Jessica Winegar, to stress the importance of discussion in artists’ lives and work. 5 Firstly, what do we understand ‘art’ to mean? The arts, here, refers to literary, visual and performative creative products that play a fundamental role into our understanding of how we see society. John Berger argued that we never just look at art, but we always situate ourselves in it, thus exploring the relation between the object and ourselves. 6 Berger gives a useful example of how, when we look at paintings that represent femininity this influences our understanding of masculinity, thus consolidating perceptions of gendered difference. 7 Whilst this provides an outdated binary understanding of gender, it helps shed light on how the arts provide fertile ground to sew exclusion into (or out of) society’s fabric. It is an accessible medium available to oppressed communities to take control of how they are represented. 8 Additionally, novelist Leo Tolstoy claimed that the role of art is to transmit one’s emotions so that the reader feels that they too have experienced them. 9 Thus, the arts are a powerful tool to transmit experiences empathetically. By empathy, we understand a ‘process in which one person imaginatively enters into the experiential world of an other’, which enables ‘the creation of interpersonal … spaces in which similarities and differences can be mobilised, expressed and explored’. 10 This is in opposition to sympathy, as the feeling of sadness or happiness for someone, underlining a distanced concern for the other’s welfare. 11 Therefore, empathy here can be seen as an effective tool to humanise stateless subjects, usually dehumanised in their forced invisibility. So, I found art exploring statelessness to give stateless actors the opportunity to participate in the public debate, in which they are normally voiceless, aiding an empathetic connection. For my research, I conducted interviews with artists from stateless nations including Palestine, Kurdistan, Azawad and Balochistan based in London, Paris and Berlin. I sought to understand how stateless art interlocutors reckon with the 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Ending Statelessness within 10 Years (Special Report, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 2018) <http://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/special-report-ending-statelessnesswithin-10-years/>. Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford University Press 2006) 10. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin 2008) 9. ibid 47. Jeremy MacClancy, Contesting Art: Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World (Berg 1997) 2. Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (Oxford University Press 1969), 169. Liz Bondi, ‘Empathy and Identification: Conceptual Resources for Feminist Fieldwork’ (2003) 2(1) ACME: International Journal of Critical Geography 64, 71, 67. Heidi L Maibom, ‘(Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Empathy’ in Heidi L Maibom (ed), Empathy and Morality (Oxford University Press 2014) 1, 3. 316