The following, “Visual Advocates:  Depicting Darfur”, appears in the book, The World and Darfur: International Response to Crimes Against Humanity in Western Sudan. Ed. Amanda Gryzb. Montreal and Kingston. McGill-Queens University Press, 2009, examines in greater detail, the representational influences and strategies employed by Darfur/ Darfur and the exhibition, The Smallest Witnesses, produced by Human Rights Watch.

The exhibition medium is increasingly being harnessed to support social justice causes, including genocide awareness.

There are multiple representational challenges inherent in creating exhibitions about genocide with regard to the complex interplay between the creatively-driven visual and textual constituents of each exhibit, the imperatives of accuracy, and the sanctity and sensitivity required by the subject matter.

The enormity of these tragedies demands that all acts of representation be judiciously conceived and created.

In the case of Darfur, the representational challenge is how to adequately depict the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of people who have died, and the more than two million people displaced and left homeless since the conflict began in February 2003.

In the exhibition, Darfur/ Darfur, viewers come to see the Darfurian genocide primarily through the lens of photography.

The documentary images that comprise Darfur/ Darfur fall into several distinct themes that provide the general visual narrative of the exhibition: panoramas of the Darfurian landscape; the devastation of Darfurian villages; the social lives of individuals and the fabric of changed communities in the aftermath of this destruction; conditions in the refugee and displaced persons camps; portraits of members of rebel groups; and portraiture featuring women, children, and the elderly – with this latter group being the focal point of the series.

The malnourished, injured, deformed, wounded, traumatized, and a few glimpses of the dead, also appear throughout the sequences, but do not predominate. Darfur/Darfur takes a mostly allusive approach to representing the crisis in Darfur by focusing on visual texts that are not explicitly about the genocide, but rather reveal the traces and voids left behind in its aftermath.

In these photographs, we see the physical environs of scarred geographical and cultural landscapes. It is, however, the victims of the genocide that are the primary subjects of the photographer’s lens.

Through these portraits of the remnants, we can begin to grasp the experience of witnessing and surviving genocide and the harsh conditions that Darfurian refugees face. Photographic absences make reference to “the missing” (and, by implication, the other realities of genocide), while brief but poignant appearances of the dead confront exhibition viewers.

By limiting the use of in extremis images, perhaps it is the intention of Darfur/Darfur to express tragedy through evoking loss, not degradation. The exhibition visitor rarely looks at the atrocities directly, references to genocidal acts are implicit, and the tragedy of Darfur is shown more obliquely. The exhibition thus avoids re-victimizing the subjects of the Darfurian genocide.

In a range of exhibition practices, we see those that draw upon the visual record of atrocity, those that consciously react against its use, and those that take a middle position. The exhibition, Darfur/ Darfur, straddles a representational halfway point. In its inclusion of both graphic and more evocative images, the exhibit prompts necessary questions about the limits and propriety of visually depicting genocide.

Is there is an intrinsic representational limit set by the radical nature of genocide? What constitutes a breach of this limit? Some critics, who claim that in exhibiting graphic images of genocide, there is potential for repeating the imaginative and ethical error that defamed the victims, have struck a cautionary note about the exploitative capacity of the visual documents of genocide. Recalling the victims of genocide through abject documentary photographs that record the last vestiges of an individual’s physical destruction, or through graphic post-mortem images, is often denounced as participating in the denigration of victims.

At the same time, some photographers’ and curators’ approaches to visualizing the genocide challenge yet another limit of representation – the limit of showing too little. While these more abstruse photographs often present a trope of tragedy, devastation, and loss more sensitively than those that explicitly depict the vast crimes perpetrated by the Government of Sudan and the Janjaweed, is enough visual information present to communicate the radical truth of genocide?

Darfur/Darfur does not fully transcend the inescapable representational trap – that visual documents of genocide concomitantly function as aesthetic objects. There are further implications raised by the aestheticization of tragedy. The more vibrant and playful images from the refugee camps may restore positive features to Darfurian individual and collective identity, creating empathetic connections between viewers and victims, and recovering from the impersonal machinery of destruction an individual glimpse of displaced lives.

However, much like the perils inherent in representing the Holocaust, within this sadly familiar “narrative” of the horrible aftermath of genocide in Africa – the pictures of women and children in refugee camps and the distribution of humanitarian aid – there lies the danger of aesthetically “resolving” atrocity and providing a form of redemptive closure.

These technically masterful and often visually pleasing images might lead viewers to think that life in such places is not all that bad. And, in that sense, the selection of photographs that appear in Darfur/Darfur – burning villages, refugee camp life, portraits of victims, babies in ill health – present another representational quandary: do such images have the same visual resonance as the much more graphic atrocity photographs from the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide?

Darfur does not have a visual record on par with the fields of bodies of Rwanda or the tragic photographic record taken at the liberation of the concentration camps at the end of the Holocaust.

Will the documentary images from Darfur adequately express the crimes that are taking place there – images engaging and compelling enough to rouse the interest of the world?

It would, however, be remiss to address this dearth of photographs by substituting tribalizing or exoticizing depictions, an easy and oft-used representational default setting that characterized the representation of the Rwandan genocide.

Unlike the Holocaust, the Darfurian crisis is not an already highly-mediated historical event, and the scant visual record of the atrocities there may present a creative representational opportunity. Those who engage in acts of representation commence their projects virtually tabula rasa, almost unfettered by past constructs. This relative freedom does not suggest that Darfur is completely free of visual clichés, or that a typified photographic treatment does not exist. Documentary images of violence in Africa tend to follow certain representational codes and conventions.

The images which comprise Darfur/ Darfur illustrate the ways in which contemporary photographers have appropriated or resisted the mise-en-scène of that genocide – the ubiquitous dying African baby, the close-up portraits of character-laden African faces, the dusty internally displaced persons camp teeming with women and children, and the rich colours of African tapestry worn by Darfurian women.

We might also ask, how are the projected images of Darfur “selected”? Is the exhibition content chosen on the basis of the perceived palatability of such images for mainstream audiences? Are the more charged images chosen based on their ability to draw audiences into the narrative of genocide? One must also consider the question: to what extent are the survivors themselves – both as individuals and as a community – engaged in the process of self-representation? How much agency are Darfurians afforded in the telling of their own experiences?

When turning from the subjects of the images to the intended audience of those images, one can query the construction of Darfur/ Darfur; how does the exhibition facilitate accessibility to/ engagement for multiple publics? The evocative compositions that comprise Darfur/Darfur, when projected, offer no information about the identities and background of those pictured, and virtually no explanatory text.

Darfur/Darfur presents an essentially mute, nameless series of photographs, whose indeterminations are heightened by the rapidity of the sequentialization. Without captioning, the images risk encouraging a cursory form of spectatorship. Can the captionless imagery of Darfur/ Darfur maintain the power to communicate substantive truths about the genocide? Or is the strength of this project bolstered by its insistence on the suggestive power of the photograph alone?

Exhibitions play an important role in resisting indifference to human suffering. That the exhibition medium is an effective tool for rousing public interest in the Darfurian genocide is irrefutable.

If exhibitions such as Darfur/ Darfur function as embarkation points for larger discussions about genocide awareness and prevention and humanitarian intervention, do they offer their audiences sufficient insight into the history, culture and politics of the region, as well as the causal factors that have enabled genocide to occur?

Furthermore, how do we measure their efficacy in moving the public discourse about genocide to more active and participatory forms of social engagement, whereby exhibitions such as Darfur/ Darfur become true agents of social change?