Human rights violations became a common fixture in the administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Since she ascended to power in 2001, enforced disappearances, illegal arrests and extrajudicial killings have been most rampant. Human rights organization KARAPATAN reports that by the end of Macapagal-Arroyo’s term in June 2010, there have been 1,206 documented victims of extra judicial killings, 206 victims of enforced disappearance, and 337 illegally arrested and detained. There were also innumerable cases of torture, “hamletting”, harassment and intimidation, and other human rights violations.
In 2008, Artists Arrest curated the exhibit Fact Sheet which featured artworks inspired and based on documents called “fact sheets” or incident reports prepared by paralegal and human rights workers in the course of documenting and campaigning against human rights violations. Based on different fact sheets given to them, the artists were asked to interpret the legal language of the reports using their own.
In its maiden exhibit notes, it declared that “under this situation, ‘fact sheets’ pile up, reaching a point where complaint desks become literally and figuratively too small to contain them. Its increasing volume starts to demand interpretations beyond legalistic jargons.” Fact Sheet thus attempted to render a human face to and a nuanced depiction of the information and statistics that, for the purposes of the courts, are stated in an impersonal manner so that the escalating problem of human right would enter public discourse.
The successful run of the exhibit in 2008 led to four more exhibitions in the years that followed. As in the original, these exhibitions featured artworks that lay bare the state of human rights in the country. The succeeding exhibits were also held in time for the commemoration of International Human Rights Day on December 10.
Taken as a whole, Fact Sheet manifests the collective and individual responses of artists to the country’s human rights situation.
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