Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

27 November 2024, from UN Human Rights:

© Francis Estrada

The top awards for the 2024 International Contest for Minority Artists were presented to five award winners — Bianca Broxton, Joel Pérez Hernández, Francis Estrada, Laowu Kuang and youth laureate Jayatu Chakma — during a special ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland.

UN Human Rights partnered with civil society organizations, Freemuse, Minority Rights Group International, the City of Geneva, the Centre des Arts of the International School of Geneva, and with the support of the Loterie Romande. The theme, Memory in the Present, celebrates the creativity and cultural expression of minority artists whose artwork explores themes relating to memory and memorialization around the globe.

“Naturally, such collective identities will largely be grounded in a collective memory of events, generating or perpetuating values or traditions that shape the way persons belonging to a minority feel bound together by common experiences,” said Nicolas Levrat, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues. “Such memories often define how and why these past experiences shared by persons belonging to a given minority (or by previous generations) make them singular, different from other groups.”

The winners and honourable mentions at the awards ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland (shown from left to right) — Francis Estrada, Maganda Shakul, Jayatu Chakma, André Fernandes, Bianca Broxton, Joel Pérez Hernández, Chuu Wai, Laowu Kuang. © OHCHR/Irina Popa

The contest serves as a platform for minority artists human rights defenders who play a key role worldwide to build bridges of understanding, dialogue and empathy through creative and artistic means. It celebrates minority artists who have made significant contributions to raise awareness, inspire action, and foster deeper understanding of human rights across diverse communities.

The Winners

Bianca Broxton in one of her performance pieces, A Conversation, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. She invited audience members to engage in a dialogue about their personal relationships with hair, racism, and beauty, while she crocheted dreadlocks to add to the piece. © Bianca Broxton

Bianca Broxton is an American interdisciplinary artist who focuses on raising awareness of health inequalities among minority women in the United States. She frames historical narratives and memories around the marginalized voices using sculptures and collages to portray minorities with dignity and a focus on restorative justice.

“My experience as a Black woman drives me to tell the histories of those who have faced systemic oppression and to portray them positively. I refuse to have my subjects seen only as victims of systemic injustice,” she said.

Visual artist Laowu Kuang accepting his award at the ceremony in Geneva, Switzerland. © OHCHR/Irina Popa  

Laowu Kuang is a visual artist belonging to the Tibetan minority in China. Through a vivid interplay of colors and textures displayed on large canvases, his artwork navigates themes of memory and memorialization in contemporary China, through traditional Tibetan symbols and motifs.

“In contrast to Western painting, with its excessive color scale, and Han Chinese painting, with its muted and elegant concept of applying colors, Tibetan painting has a strong and intense contrast of colors,” he said. “The stone carvings of Tibetan folk art are a perfect combination of religion and nature, which is a communication and dialogue between human beings and gods, between heaven and earth.”

Joel Pérez Hernández is a visual and plastic artist from the Maya Tseltal people, born in the Lacandón jungle of Chiapas, Mexico. Hernández has dedicated years to studying traditional techniques and motifs with elder artisans and creators of his community.

“Much knowledge is asleep in our mountains, voices are trapped in the rivers, colors sleep under the stones, and in our collective memory, as well,” he said. “My people nourish me and motivate me to awaken all that; that is what I include in my works. I find no need to sign my pieces, because my people, my family, my friends make up the essence of each one of them.”

Born in the Philippines, Francis Estrada is a visual artist and educator, currently residing in the United States. Estrada’s artwork focuses on culture, history, and perception, and questions the influence of historical photographs, mass media, political propaganda, and personal archives on social narratives and collective memory.

“My art is a tool through which I confront how our understandings of culture are mediated, and the methods through which history and memory are created and perpetuated,” he said. “I think of my work as partial narratives for the viewers to complete based on their own experiences and associations.”

Youth laureate Jayatu Chakma is an artist belonging to the Chakma Indigenous community of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region in Bangladesh. His artwork features ink, acrylic, watercolor, and natural elements like mud and colors from leaves, as a way to reflect on the life of his community in relation with forced displacement and the loss of their lands.

“Chittagong Hill Tracts is a part of Bangladesh which represents a culture of variation in terms of people and landscape,” he said. “But there are stories hidden behind the decorated valleys of Chittagong Hill Tracts: my artworks are influenced by the stories of being displaced, losing belongings and relatives. I want to create artworks that show a different side of Chittagong Hill Tracts, besides its natural beauty and cultural diversity that we see on TV.”

https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2024/11/international-art-contest-celebrates-minority-human-rights-defenders