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This session explores how artists across diverse media have represented guns and gun violence, not only as aesthetic subjects but as ethical provocations. The firearm is a charged symbol—of state power and individual freedom, of aggression and protection, of spectacle and trauma. Its presence in art demands critical engagement with the conditions of its visibility: Who gets to show guns, and why? What are the stakes of representing firearms in cultures marked by mass shootings, militarization, colonial legacies, and armed resistance?

Rather than focusing solely on anti-violence messages or activist art, this panel invites nuanced investigations into how guns are visualized—how their meanings shift across context, culture, and form. How do artists negotiate the line between critique and glorification, between documentation and fetish? What strategies—satirical, poetic, forensic, or visceral—have artists employed to confront the aesthetics and politics of armed violence? How do audiences respond to such images, and how do institutions frame them?

This session seeks interdisciplinary papers that examine artistic representations of guns in photography, film, painting, performance, installation, and digital media. Topics might include: the eroticization of weaponry; guns as national iconography; artworks responding to mass shootings; visual culture in armed protest; or the weapon as archive. In centering the ethical questions that emerge from this work, the session asks: What does it mean to look at a gun in art, and what kind of looking does such an image demand?