ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the ethics and politics of transnational witnessing in Ciudad Juárez art, paying particular attention to the project by Irish artist Brian Maguire, ‘An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom’, exhibited in various locations including Carlow (Vision Centre 2012) and Cork, Ireland (Triskel Arts Centre 2013), Liverpool, UK (2014) and the European Parliament in Brussels. Using the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler as a lens through which to frame Western audiences’ responses to atrocities in the ‘elsewheres of the World’ (Butler 2011), it argues for the possibility of ‘empathic encounters’ while remaining attentive to the tensions posed by the creation of such networks of global solidarity. In this regard, it scrutinizes the limitations of empathy and the risks always inherent in any ‘aesthetics of immediacy’ that posits systemic gender violence as some kind of emergency requiring immediate rectification on the part of its first world witnesses.
