‘Humanising’ Statelessness art has always been effective at speaking out against injustice. Indeed, historically, art has been a powerful resource for oppressed communities themselves to tell their stories and mark their existence, by way of forcing people to listen, stop, reflect and put themselves in their shoes. As such art can be an extremely effective way to foster radical empathy. 63 Similarly, Lindsey N Kingston places emphasis on visual representation to bring the issue of statelessness to wider audiences. 64 However, none of the reports or authors discussed investigate or ask how art comes into being and what kind of ideas, knowledge and concepts are used to develop an artistic approach. As Rika Allen argues, artistic representations often reproduce knowledge that already exists. She argues that the knowledge artwork brings forward cannot be neutral when the artist’s ideology plays such a crucial role; the art is determined by the artist’s knowledge. 65 Allen states, ‘the [artist’s] gaze is influenced by what is known, knowledge is also influenced by how one sees the world’. 66 In the context of my research, I investigated these issues by participating and observing the art-based approaches employed by Creative Court and its partner on statelessness. I set out to understand the ways art frames and represents statelessness, the strategies it suggests and the kind of knowledge it brings forward from a critical standpoint. ‘HUMANISING’ STATELESSNESS THROUGH GENERATING EMPATHY In this Part, I analyse the major themes that came from my observation. I show how an artistic approach to statelessness strongly advocates communicating with wider audiences by showing the human aspects of statelessness. The main objective of this Part is to present how art ‘humanises’ statelessness and how it is different from the dominant discourses already discussed, which in turn answers my second and third research question simultaneously. Statelessness is most often framed and represented as a ‘legal anomaly’ 67 and thus ‘exists in a vacuum’. 68 Creative Court and its partner Empathy and Risk wanted to go beyond this lens with their artwork. Both organisations shared a common idea: rules and laws insufficiently address problems of stateless people — they do not show the human side of the problem and fail to ‘move’ society. Building on this idea, they came up with an art programme entitled ‘Cancelled Art’, 69 which was designed to unveil these human conditions of statelessness at the World Conference on Statelessness and Inclusion. David Cottrell, founder of Empathy and Risk explained it in the opening session of the conference. He said, 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 ibid. Kingston, ‘Conceptualizing Statelessness’ (n 7) 52. Rika Allen, ‘The Anthropology of Art and the Art of Anthropology — A Complex Relationship’ (Masters Thesis, University of Stellenbosch 2008). ibid 6. For example see Alice Edwards and Carla Ferstman, Human Security and Non-Citizens: Law, Policy and International Affairs (Cambridge University Press 2010); Mark Manly and Laura van Waas, ‘The State of Statelessness Research’ (2014) 19(1–2) Tilburg Law Review 3. Kingston, ‘Conceptualizing Statelessness’ (n 7) 54. ‘Cancelled Art Programme’, Creative Court (Web Page, 2019) <https://www.creativecourt.org/index.php/portfolio/cancelled/>; ‘Cancelled Arts Programme’, Empathy and Risk (Web Page, 2019) <http://www.empathyandrisk.com/2019/06/26/cancelled-arts-programme/>. 283