Abstract: Michal Heiman’s project, Return: asylum (the Dress, 1855-2018), consists of photographs of women and men clothed in a dress similar to one worn by women inmates at the former Surrey County Lunatic Asylum in the 1850s. Traversing time, space, gender, race and institutional practices of asylum, the artist takes the viewers on a ride in a time machine that is not a technological devise but a discourse on memory and on owning the future: s/he who wears the dress has the potential to return as witness, reader, artist, prosecutor, gate-keeper or rebel, thereby transforming her exceptional story into ours. Return: Asylum is an act of resistance: it engages human imagination in re-presenting the regenerative power of human solidarity as an alternative to current political practices that sacrifice the right of asylum—the only right that since the dawn of political life, as noted by Arendt, “has ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man”—at the altar of a security theology.
This content is restricted to site members. If you are an existing user, please login. New users may click here to subscribe.
Current Issue
The latest issue of Humanity is out! Its special dossier interrogates recent humanitarian laws on the protection of healthcare workers, with essays examining various histories of attacks on healthcare in the long twentieth century. The issue also includes essays on a new politics of care as an alternative political framework to that of human rights; Carl Schmitt’s tenets of international law; and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s racial and cultural ideas on political economy.
View entire issue >
Save
Save
Save
📘'Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics' is now available for pre-order!
❕Grab your copy and save 30% OFF using the code NEW30 at checkout : https://edin.ac/3JIcRne
@HumanityJ
Login Status
If you are not a subscriber, you can sign up now.