The Flood of Rights

Contributions by Amanda Beech, Rony Brauman, David Campbell, Olivia Custer, Rosalyn Deutsche, Thomas Keenan, Eric Kluitenberg, David Levine, Suhail Malik, Sohrab Mohebbi, Sharon Sliwinski, Hito Steyerl, Bernard Stiegler, Tirdad Zolghadr

It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse, images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today. And they seem to come in a flood, more and more, day and night. But through which channels does the torrent pass? The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images and ideas circulate—routes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims and their conceptual background. What are the technologies and languages that structure the global distribution of humanism and universalism, and how do they leave their mark on these ideas themselves? Which narratives and imageries have proven easier to export and import, and whose interests are at stake in the configurations in question?

The Flood of Rights draws on a conference of the same name, organized by the LUMA Foundation and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, which took place in Arles, France, in 2013.