Artpeace: Validating Power, Mobilising Resistance, and Imagining Emancipation

Art has apparently followed political power for much of history, while avoiding representations of social, subaltern, and political resistance, or experimentation with new approaches to emancipation. Less obviously, however, this article outlines how a creative synthesis of critique, politics, and representation has led to an evolving form of ‘artpeace’. This concept appears to have been related to power and was thus limited and Eurocentric in the past, but more importantly it has also provided a platform for critical agency, resistance, and experimentation, with implications for the politics of peacemaking. This article outlines what this means for various strands of artpeace and their possible conceptual implications.

‘Pax optima rerum’ (Peace is the greatest good)

‘Pax optima rerum quas homini nouisse datum est, pax una triumphis innumeris potior…’ (peace is the best of things which it is given to man to know, a single peace is more powerful than countless triumphs). Silius Italicus, Punica, (25-101 AD)