Commissions
A key part of our research involves commissioning new arts-based collaborations to initiate work that suggests new languages and approaches to human rights. Through these commissions, we seek to both reinforce existing collaborations and establish new partnerships with artists and activists.
In 2023 we launched our first targeted commissioning call, Conversations in KIOSKs. This was followed by Conversations with Testimony, Conversations with Reports and We Are (For) Civil Society in 2024, and Conversations with Reports (Amnesty International) in 2025.
-
Commissioning Call One, 2023
Inspired by the East Leeds Project, this commissioning call invited collaborative pairings between artists and activists (broadly understood) to design and activate their own KIOSK within their local communities.
-
Commissioning Call Two, 2024
Personal testimony lies at the very heart of almost all documentation of human rights abuses.
We asked artists and activists to think about how the arts can challenge and provoke us to expand our ideas of testimony, offering bold new languages for expression, persuasion, and protest in the fields of human rights and social justice.
-
Commissioning Call Three, 2024
In Conversations with Reports, artists were invited to respond to a human rights report by reframing it in a new genre, innovative form, or meta-narrative.
Human rights reports typically focus on forensic truth (rooted in the legal understanding of truth, as objective, corroborated evidence). Artists were encouraged to question this notion of ‘truth’, and were invited to explore alternative forms of truth: personal and narrative truth; social or ‘dialogue’ truth; and healing and restorative truth.
-
Commissioning Call Four, 2024
Civil society is under attack in many parts of the world. Such attacks can be legislative, administrative, financial or physical. Much work is being done to document these crackdowns and resistance to such measures. Less energy has been devoted to making the case for civil society, and more generally for human rights.
While in the past we may have assumed that the majority of people think that civil society and human rights are a ‘good thing’, we are living in an era where the case for both needs to be made anew.
In this call, we invited proposals from artists and activists working together seeking to communicate the value and contributions of civil society through art.
-
Commissioning Call Five, 2025
In this call, artists and activists are invited to respond to a particular human rights report by Amnesty International titled Under Protected and Over Restricted: The State of the Right to Protest in 21 European Countries (July 2024). The report ‘reveals a continent-wide pattern of repressive laws, use of unnecessary or excessive force, arbitrary arrests and prosecutions, unwarranted or discriminatory restrictions as well as the increasing use of invasive surveillance technology, resulting in a systematic roll back of the right to protest’. The report is part of Amnesty International’s global campaign called ‘Protect the Protest’.