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The adoption of Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (1993) was a significant moment recognising women’s right to a life free from violence as an international issue. And yet, recently we have observed an intensification of gender-based violence, igniting arts activist interventions to raise consciousness, protest and advocate. Los Zapatos Rojos, a collaborative project (realised since 2009) by a Mexican artist Elina Chauvet is a potent example. It involves laying out hundreds of pairs of red shoes in urban spaces across the world to mark the absence of women who lost their lives to gender-based violence.

In ‘Understanding Patriarchy’ (2004) bell hooks writes, ‘Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation’, reinforcing mechanisms of control and dominance through diverse forms of violence. hooks argues, ‘Feminist thinking offers a solution’. Violence is a multiple oppression paradigm, as demonstrated by ‘El Violentómetro’ (Violence Meter), a tool developed by a Mexican scholar Martha Alicia Tronco Rosas. It is a simple graphic measuring and manifesting the spectrum of gender-based violent acts of power enacted by subtle means through to femicide, the majority of which remain hidden and silenced.

This session invites contributions engaging with specific case studies of feminist contemporary arts activism to bring awareness of human rights violations that are gender-based. It seeks to address emotional, physical and sexual abuses, practices of coercive and financial control, sexism and victim blaming; and explore the envisaged by hooks potential solutions founded in feminist thinking.