Diplomatic images are not mere visual archives of past encounters; they are complicit in how the past is framed, memorialized, and reproduced in the service of contemporary raison d’état. This chapter is about one such instance of complicity. It tracks the afterlife of an image of five ministers from Cold War Southeast Asia – all male, in Western business suits, and bespectacled – signing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into existence in Bangkok in 1967. More than any other, this image has been reproduced and disseminated to symbolize ASEAN: from book covers and commemorative stamps to television reports and even a commissioned painting. This image gives contemporary ASEAN a satisfying origin myth – of five ‘founding fathers’ forging diplomatic reconciliation in the aftermath of militarized inter-state conflict in a region marked as exceptionally diverse along racial, religious, cultural, and linguistic registers. But the image – and the props and performance it captures – contains within it the seeds of an alternative reading that puts this origin myth to lie. The chapter argues that far from embodying such exceptional and heroic diversity, the image tells us what was profoundly (and problematically) similar among these diplomatic performers than what the contemporary discourse on ASEAN reveals.

Chapter 4 examines how obscenity is used as a regulatory mechanism by focusing on dead enemy bodies, using the cases of Muammar Qaddafi and Osama bin Laden. Images of violently dead bodies have been circulated and mobilized in the service of the war-on-terror. This framing shapes the understanding of what war is, via which images of war are deemed legitimate grounds for visual consumption. In considering the technologies of erasure in the war-on-terror, images of Qaddafi reinforced the notion of the inevitable failure of dictatorship. The dead body image of Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was not publicly released despite widespread demand to see it, but its visibility was characterized as a security risk. The chapter elucidates the visual grammar of images that are overtly related to foreign policy actions such as counter-terrorism or democracy promotion. These larger policy discourses are supported and reinforced by the production and circulation of images of dead enemies in particular ways. By the rupture of the dead body taboo, viewers are instructed to engage with images in specific ways, and thus to engage the policy subjects of those images in particular ways, sustaining a larger narrative of security.

This introduction focuses on how dead body images, seen as taboo, are framed in various ways to humanize or dehumanize the dead. The graphic nature of images of the dead in humanitarianism is framed as precisely what provides the grounds for their power to effect change; the social and cultural taboo against viewing dead bodies means that when we are invited to view them, it must be under extraordinary circumstances, and viewing is itself posited as a political act. Yet critics have raised the issue of voyeurism, pain porn, or compassion fatigue. In the context of dead enemy bodies, images of enemy dead are often viewed in a context that perpetuates a distancing between the viewer and the subject of the image, designed to cultivate affective responses of retribution, hatred, and satisfied revenge, rather than empathy. These framings are introduced precisely because the binary between bodies we display and bodies we don’t display needs to be examined and problematized. This begins to illustrate what is at stake in the context of the politics of emotion, in the sense that emotions are constructed and shaped through binaries of self and other, though these distinctions are always tentative.

The book begins with a short introduction to the broad problems and key questions which shape the enquiry. Namely, that an holistic perspective of transitional justice should include legal, social, and cultural measures, within which visual art has an important role. I identify the tendency in transitional justice scholarship which addresses the arts to privilege civil society arts initiatives over state-sponsored ones and to focus on the performing arts over visual art – two gaps which the book begins to fill. I then outline the two-part case study of post-apartheid South African visual art across important national and international institutions, the Constitutional Court of South Arica and the South African Pavilion at the International Art Biennale in Venice. The introduction concludes with a breakdown of the individual chapters and the arguments presented.

The conclusion outlines the key implications and contributions of the book. Art is a radical form of political participation in times of transition.In South Africa visual art creates new critical spaces of political recognition and representation.Art is embedded in creative state-building, both internally and externally.The state uses visual art from the inside out to reconceptualise the South African justice system, and from the outside in to re-engage the international community with the South African state.The conclusion also addresses two potential criticisms facing the book, namely that what is discussed does not count as transitional justice and whether art really matters in post-conflict settings in the face of urgent human need.