Tuesday 1 November, 1300-1400<\/p>\n
War Studies Meeting Room, K6.07, King\u2019s Building, Strand Campus, King\u2019s College London<\/p>\n
Speaker: Eliza Garnsey, University of Cambridge<\/p>\n
Chair: Dr Rachel Kerr, King\u2019s College London<\/p>\n
The Constitutional Court of South Africa stands on the site of several former notorious prisons where \u2018virtually every important political leader in South African history from Mahatma Gandhi to Nelson Mandela as well as scores of ordinary South Africans caught in the web of colonial and apartheid repression\u2019 (Segal, 2006) were once imprisoned. The Court is symbolically significant\u2014representing South Africa\u2019s transition\u2014and physically significant\u2014establishing a spatial precedent for how to address the past in building the future. The building is a unique space by international comparison, not only because it has transformed the penal site, but because it integrates artworks into the fabric of the architecture and houses a large visual art collection developed by and for the Court. These artworks draw attention to individual, collective, and time-based narratives which play a role in a shaping the larger \u2018unity in diversity\u2019 narrative at the Court, understood as a new kind of \u2018visual jurisprudence\u2019 which, in such close proximity to the Court, inhabits a unique position where the assumptions of justice and what it means to uphold the Constitution in a \u2018new\u2019 South Africa can be probed.<\/em><\/p>\n Eliza Garnsay is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the University of Cambridge, where her research focuses on transitional justice and art in \u2018post-apartheid\u2019 South Africa.<\/p>\n