Symposium on Symposium on Art, Aesthetics and International Justice: For the Love of Art (and Justice)

[Sofia Stolk is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law and Public International Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam]

When I had the privilege of collaborating with Marina on an exhibition and performance around art and international justice in The Hague in 2019, I witnessed how she theorizes, practices, and preaches art as an act of love. Her book is the culmination of years of thinking and doing art and international law. It is a wonderful invitation to re-imagining international justice through an aesthetic lens, or rather to reappreciate how its aesthetic dimension is, and always has been, undeniable. It offers a way to think beyond the question of ‘what is international justice’ to ‘how do we (make) sense (of) it’. The problem of international justice, as Marina aptly identifies, is a lack of self-reflection. Her work offers room for a much-needed experiential standpoint. 

It feels only fitting to pick up on a four themes inspired by Marina’s work—humanity, complexity, resistance, and play— through the lens of a few artworks I love.

Humanity

In March 2025, I joined the closing event of the exhibition Lens on law: Edges of proximity, the outcome of an artist in residency collaboration between three photography students of the Royal Academy of Art and international law researchers at the Asser Institute. One of the artists, Daria Radu, explicitly engaged with international justice as her work searches for the human touch and imperfections hidden within the authoritative and distancing grandeur of international courthouses. Her photos showed the humanity within what she, as an outsider to the world of law, initially experienced to be overpowering fortresses that made her feel, in her words, inadequate. One picture that I found particularly moving is that of a coffee stain on the floor of an ICC office. The stain reminds us that ‘international justice’ is the work of people and that ‘aesthetics’ do not necessarily equal extraordinary beauty or splendor; showing the traces of everyday life within a courthouse enables us to get closer and to engage. 

As Marina argues in her book, art can be a humanizing force. By engaging with the aesthetic theory of, amongst others, Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, she opens the door to contemplating on international justice as an everyday experience and to find the universality of the particular, invoking the notion of our ‘shared capacity for wonder’ (p 44). I think this is a powerful approach that can account for Marina’s claim to art’s capacity to strengthen authority as well as its subversive potential that I will discuss further below. Ultimately, the question of justice is a question of humanity, and Marina reminds us that there is nothing better than art to explore what it means to be human. Art, in the broadest sense of the word, can include people into the process of shaping international law beyond the elite who speak law’s language. A focus on art, aesthetic theory, and the power of perception can help us to understand international justice as something that is part of our daily lives, whether we choose to embrace, resist, or ignore it. Even the iconic representations of international law, such as the Peace Palace, are also a tourist destination with space for play, selfies and ice cream. This is what Renske Vos call Legal Sightseeing, international law in its most mundane manifestation makes people engage with it, transform it, share it, and own it. An aesthetic approach to international justice has such an emancipatory, transformative potential exactly because it humanizes a practice that has the tendency to over-emphasize the technical, the textual, and the extra-ordinary.   

Complexity

A related theme I want to pick up on is the quality of art to raise ‘uneasy questions and complexities that an outcome-driven judgment may not be able to capture’ (p 136). As Marina notes, art is probably better equipped than law to communicate complex truths. Without reducing art to a vehicle of communication, its openness, open-endedness and multiplicity can bring back some of the complexity that we often lose in the reductive legal process towards international justice. Specifically in the context of reparations, Marina discusses art’s potential to remedy law’s dualistic categories and formulaic language (p 118) and ‘to connect legal findings with the broader emotional landscape of the specific case at issue’ (p 119). The dualistic nature of international law and its difficult relation to the complex unspeakable dimension of trauma and justice is beautifully illustrated by the film In Flow of Words by Dutch visual artist Eliane Esther Bots. Her film, quite literally, gives voice to the interpreters at the ICTY who were juggling the professional expectations of giving ‘neutral’ translations with the deeply emotional content of the words spoken in court, while dealing with their own trauma at the same time. The film is poetic in image and narration and lays bare the troubled relation between the language of the law and the sensation of (in)justice. Some things are said best when left unsaid. While aesthetic theory can help add, find, or relocate complexity in international justice, it also confronts us with the limits of our international system to provide such complex justice.

Resistance  

Next, I turn to a dimension of aesthetic theory and art that does not prominently figure in Marina’s book but is intimately entangled with any notion of justice: art as a form of critique and resistance. Art is very suitable as a subversive method and aesthetic theory can be a great tool of critique. It is not always primarily a quest for beauty that drives art. Art can arise from or lead to hope but it also often encompasses despair, hurt, and suffering. It is a language of injustice as much as justice. As the words of Palestinian artist Marwan Makhoul remind us: In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political/ I must listen to the birds/ and in order to hear the birds/ the warplanes must be silent. 

Art is and has always been a key form of resistance in the face of violence and oppression. If we think with Marina’s notion of universality, I believe that ongoing struggle is as much part of the aesthetics of international justice as are visions of hopeful co-existence. For example, Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost provides us with an insight into the heartbreakingly universality of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and how it never and always ever was about the occupied West Bank. It is a story about art as a shelter as well as the heart of resistance and solidarity. Art in the face of injustice can be reparative, as appears so powerfully in Danish Sheik’s theatrical work. And as a subversive intervention, the ‘counter-aesthetics’ of international justice can expose, criticize, and counter the injustices of international justice itself, such as Lodovica Guarnieri’s (UN)just peace audio tour through The Hague.

Yet, Hammad also critically asks us whether, at times, this power of art might perhaps be deceiving, when she writes:

…while there are moments in these concerts and poetry readings and lectures and plays when you might feel connected to the other people in the room, to the people behind the screen, you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you, or at least the middle classes, are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved, momentarily, and perhaps our Hamlet would be just another version of this narcotic and what, if anything, could we do about that?

Art can awaken us yet it can also do the contrary; it can blind us to the problems. The history of human rights teaches us that any claim to universality is always risky when it stops us from interrogating inequality. To speak of justice in terms of aesthetics entails the risk that we come to see art as a solution to injustice or it can tempt us to reduce aesthetic thinking to beauty and peace. Yet, art can be ugly, destabilizing, dehumanizing, and dividing too. While Marina discusses Wittgenstein’s idea that aesthetics and ethics pursue a similar goal, a life worth living, this does not mean that art is necessarily ethical. Art can harm as much as it can heal. It breaks but also creates new hierarchies. This is by no means a reason to stop engaging with it—even the character in Enter Ghost seems to invoke her critique primarily by way of invitation to debunk it—it is just a reminder to keep suspicious of romanization. At the same time, indulging in romanticization may sometimes be the only medicine against despair.  

Play

All in all, Marina’s book offers us a deep dive into aesthetic theory and provides us with a solid blueprint of how to incorporate aesthetic thinking into our theories and methods of international justice. In her conclusion, she calls for an observe-build-play approach. I want to pick up on the latter and use it as an invitation to legal researchers to start playing too, and to incorporate not only aesthetic theories but also artistic methods into our legal research and teaching repertoire.  

We do not all have to be artist to still be able to deploy and appreciate artistic research techniques and to use them to stretch our brains. Marina points out how aesthetic theory is a way out of the limitations of linear thinking that we are so familiar with in international law (p 61). To embrace non-linearity and visuality in our theoretical approach and to aim for an ‘imaginative inquiry’ urges us, in my view, to experiment with non-linear and visual research methods too. This is no longer unchartered territory in international legal scholarship: Tasniem Anwar and Machteld Aardse have shown how artistic courtroom drawing can bring out the non-spectacular and soften conversations about terrorism trials; a theatrical reenactment of the Ongwen trial organized by Sarah Nouwen and Wouter Werner offered a new way of experiencing and sensing what the performance of international criminal law is and does, emphasizing how trials too are a form of human interaction; and Saara Särmä and others inspire us to turn to collaging as a destructive yet fun way to break and (re)build connections, allowing for non-hierarchical, messy, open-ended associations. 

Marina identifies co-creation as important aspect of international justice, and such practices of co-creation can be found at the root of these artistic methods. If we want to humanize international justice, I suggest we start by also humanizing our research methods and reconsider what ‘counts’ as scholarly output. Marina’s book allows us to changes gears and take creativity, perception, and emotion seriously as source of knowledge and justice. In line with how I watched her intensely enjoying the art and music at the Asser institute back in 2019, I read her work and her proposal for international justice 2.0 as an act of love and as an invitation to embrace creativity to make things better. And what is more beautiful than that.