Imagining Human Rights

Susanne Kaul and David Kim

Introduction: Imagining Human Rights

For about six weeks in the fall of 2011, visitors to the Crypt Gallery in London had the rare opportunity to bear witness to an unusual underground world in several senses of the term. Deep below the surface, in the basement of St. Pancras Church, the London-based Greek artist Kalliopi Lemos had transformed the early nineteenth-century burial crypt into a ghostly passage for life-size wooden boats and animal-like creatures. Made of smoothly bent metal, birds, snakes, and bees animated this selectively lit space, while their motions had been suspended at various stages of life. Here, time seemed to have stopped or at least slowed down, as the installation presented a contemporary ...