2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) victims. This dominant framing dehumanises stateless people. Art-based approaches propose to set out different narratives and discourses of statelessness, focusing on the human aspects of being stateless to humanise the issue. Creative Court and its partner intended to bring forward the vulnerabilities, hope and agency of stateless people, as well as subtly question current understandings. This art-based approach intended to present alternative perspectives on statelessness. It framed statelessness as a ‘human’ issue’, rather a mere ‘legal’ issue. I demonstrated, through my analysis, that the artistic approach recognises basic human aspects concerning stateless people and goes beyond how statelessness is dominantly framed and represented. This reflects Creative Court and Empathy and Risk’s principal objective of framing and representing statelessness in a humanising way, so that other people can connect themselves to stateless persons through empathy. I felt the art-based approach succeeds in doing so. However, careful analysis of these artworks shows that even if the framing of statelessness is humanised, the solution often remains a legal one, lacking a view of stateless people themselves. Nevertheless, this artistic approach can be seen as an effort to study statelessness from a different angle that shows human aspects of the stateless situation. Finally, I want to address three issues that are worthy of further exploration. First, I both felt and observed that the conference artworks succeeded in generating in the participants, including myself, an empathy towards stateless people. However, I am not sure how these artworks would have been received by a different audience who did not necessarily possess an interest in, or knowledge of, the issue of statelessness. The conference itself was about statelessness, participants were invited selectively based on their expertise or engagement in the issue. Therefore, I felt it was relatively easy to generate such empathy in participants that were already invested in statelessness in some way. What would have happened in a different location or setting, with people who are not generally aware of, or concentrated on, statelessness? It would be interesting to gauge the responses of more general audiences. Second, the artworks I have observed were not community-led artworks. While the artists and the organisations met with some stateless people, collected their stories and translated them into artworks, we do not know if the stateless persons themselves would represent their stories, hope, agency, identity and resilience in the same manner. How would they have done it? Future researchers could think about engaging themselves in a community-led art project to see the difference. Third, there is a growing concern regarding ‘the ethnographic turn in art’. 124 Statelessness is a very complex issue; stateless persons and groups experience statelessness in different ways and in different socio-cultural, economic and political contexts. It would be interesting to combine ethnographic knowledge in art-based approaches to grasp these perceptions, practices and meanings of statelessness. Thus, I believe an ethnographic turn in art practices regarding statelessness can further enhance the cause of humanising statelessness. Community-led art projects, and the utilisation of ethnographic knowledge to translate them into artistic representations of statelessness, could generate radical empathy for the stateless people. In turn, this could influence 124 See, eg, Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz, ‘The Ethnographic Turn — and After: A Critical Approach towards the Realignment of Art and Anthropology’ (2015) 23(4) Social Anthropology 428; Kris Rutten, An van Dienderen and Ronald Soetaert, ‘Revisiting the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art’ (2013) 27(5) Critical Arts 459 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02560046.2013.855513>. 298

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