Lack is not a psychic defect to be repaired but the condition through which subjectivity, speech, and desire persist when the impossible intrudes. In clinical work with people facing bereavement, suicide, sexual violence, war, community and gun violence, child abuse, forced migration, and self-injury, trauma routinely outlives therapeutic promises of cure. When trauma is regarded as healable, patients and clinicians are drawn into a restless hunt for the “right” remedy—another modality, another provider, another level of care, a new art therapy directive or medium, a different medication—only to meet the persistence of what does not resolve.

This paper theorizes that impasse through Lacanian psychoanalysis and Mari Ruti’s existential Lacanian ethics. Lacan situates trauma as an encounter with the Real: an excess over the edge of language that cannot be fully symbolized and therefore returns as remainder. The imperative to “heal” risks reinstalling a fantasy of wholeness that disavows structural lack and constricts desire. Following Ruti, I treat lack not as a deficit to eradicate but as the ground of ethical becoming and freedom within constraint.

Treating the aesthetic act in art therapy as an existential confrontation with trauma’s incurability, I argue that creative responses are necessarily partial: they cannot fully name the pain, fill psychic voids, or transform what exceeds meaning. Their partiality is generative, sustaining desire and opening a space where meanings and possibilities emerge unpredictably. Living with trauma becomes possible through an ongoing, deferred process rather than a final resolution.

In contemporary societies, refugees increasingly belong to those deemed undesirable, whose dehumanisation and disenfranchisement appear legitimate within political discourses that foreground deterrence. Against this backdrop, my activist, performative, and participatory research with refugees addresses how intersubjective articulation, recognition, and understanding can be conceptualised and enacted under conditions marked by structural violence and epistemic injustice (Brunner 2020). This endeavour is crucial, as the articulation of suffering often unfolds beyond therapeutic spaces, which remain insufficient or inaccessible, and beyond asylum hearings, which grant recognition only within narrowly defined legal frameworks.

Following suggestions from my research partners, we refrain from relying solely on interviews and instead engage in multimodal and artistic modes of articulation. Through drawing, collective music-making, and performative readings based on literary testimonies of former prison inmates, we explore the possibilities and limits of creating spaces of articulation and resistance vis-à-vis ‘total institutions’ (Goffman 1973), autocratic regimes in Iran and Syria, and experiences of racism in Germany. My research partners provide crucial insights into life under authoritarian rule—what suffering they endured, what forms of resistance they developed, and what sustains them in exile.

By theorising articulation (Jung 2009) as an intersubjective, multimodal, and multimedial process, my research conceptualises “spaces of articulation” as dynamic, relational encounters where suffering and resistance can be negotiated. Such theorising asks how articulation can be understood not merely as an act of verbal expression, but as a situated practice of knowledge production that challenges dominant narratives and opens transformative horizons for translocal solidarity and learning.

This single case study seeks to demonstrate how artists and cultural producers are applying notions of affect through art exhibitions as a tool for antiracist interventions. It provides an example of an affective exhibition seeking to move a community through grief and towards a processing of difficult emotions. Art moves people’s interior selves, the parts we feel deeply and without initial understanding, through movement, color, sound, the body, and materials (Cole & Knowles, 2008). Art tells the narrative that stirs emotions, becoming the stepping off point to mobilize (Speed Museum of Art, 2022). Affect can propel us toward potentials (Massumi, 1995), and art activates the imagination to design futures free of police and gun violence.

Art and affect inspired me to curate how I saw racism moving from centuries’ old histories through our present circumstance, life after an insurrection, the leader of the insurrection is our sitting president, and advancements won regarding police reform and education equity have been erased, but the future is wide open and full of potential.

Art can be used to draw out expressions of interior liminal spaces (Finley, 2008). These expressions, such as butterflies from nerves, goosebumps, or a reflexive movement, communicate embodied ways of knowing by listening to affective responses through arts-based methodologies. Exhibitions hold potential for affective forces to move through the narrative and to incorporate affective resonances between bodies and objects, bodies and the environment, and bodies meeting other bodies. It is becoming more common to see exhibitions curated by and featuring Black and Indigenous art (https://hyperallergic.com/).

One exhibition, Promise Witness Remembrance (Speed Museum of Art, 2022), curated by Allison Glenn in 2021, at the Speed Museum of Art, acted as a reflection of the value of Breonna Taylor’s life. As an act of retribution, the exhibition was a space where people could gather, bringing bodies together in mourning to feel and heal. Promise Witness Remembrance provided time, space, and representation, especially for Black peoples, who have had their cultures stolen and placed on display in western Museums (Krmpotich & Peers, 2013). It was followed, two years later using the new contemporary curator, with an exhibition titled Amy Sherald’s Portrait of Breonna Taylor: In the Garden, as a request from her family (https://www.speedmuseum.org/) and to fulfill the museum’s obligation to the family. Affect may have been the connective thread of these exhibitions, moved by a moment or an opportunity for her family to remember who Breonna Taylor was, while also creating space for the people of Louisville to reflect. I wonder if or how the first exhibition influenced the second and if they were both meant to serve as spaces for processing difficult emotions. These affective resonances between artwork, family, and institutions and state-sanctioned violence served as means of remembrance.

Research Questions

● How does affect theory help us understand the impact of exhibition spaces?

○ How might art curators understand exhibitions as affective spaces?

● How are art institutions affected by the community, and how do they affect their community in turn?

○ How does an art exhibition that engages with race and racism affect its host institution?

Using heuristic inquiry, which has the capacity to address the embodied sensations brought on by affect, my hope was that each interview subject’s contribution would contribute to a whole picture that showed whether or not affect emphasized any of the exhibition’s antiracist implications (Sha, 2017). Heuristics connected the depths of what I embodied with the depths of the exhibition I researched (Moustakas, 1990). In the case of this research, I carried the way art moves through the body and how the body reacts when difficult emotions pass through it. When tuning into affect, such disruptions can inspire productive, creative multimedia responses (Zembylas, 2022), but affect is not inquiry. The movement and flow of affect were the pulse that moved through the body and art as the object that catalyzed affect. “Affects, then, move between and through bodies and things that they come in contact with, providing ‘object-targets’, namely, ‘States, institutions [e.g. schools]” (p. 25) Zembylas wrote about the anti-Muslim backlash after 9/11, when hegemonic forces conspired to promote hate. A technology of power, Muslim people became the object-targets of the use of affect and discomfort. If they are to be rendered as a violent tool, might the feeling states between an art object and its audience be used as a technology of support? In other words, considering affect as the tool, institutions would make time for meaning making to be built through collaborative contribution. that necessary time for processing and shifting the themes that emerge and the imagery used to curate through the emotional ranges of grief, loss, love, and resilience, surfaces when planning an art exhibition.

The embodied, connective relationship between affect and object led me to wonder about heuristics and its relationship with connection; inquiry is the lifeline that moved through my body and the art exhibition I studied, and it started with seeing the cover of the exhibition catalog for Promise Witness Remembrance. This is what Sela-Smith refers to as the “I-who-feels” (Sela-Smith, 2002, p. 58) More specifically, she states, “When someone feels an internal draw and hears the call from the deepest recesses of the self, it is almost impossible not to notice. This may be something that is being consciously or unconsciously experienced as incomplete that needs to be completed” (p. 64) Sela-Smith brought the process of heuristic inquiry back to the self by reminding the researcher that the questions, once realized, surface everywhere. “The challenge is fulfilled through examples, narrative descriptions, dialogues, stories, poems, artwork, journals, and diaries, autobiographical logs, and other personal documents” (Moustakas, 1990, p. 310). I purchased the catalog from the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston.

The catalog’s sky teal and purple cover showed the Amy Sherald portrait of Breonna Taylor looking back at me (Speed Museum of Art, 2022). The book’s cover was the initial hook, but as I scrolled through the pages, I saw examples of antiracist curatorial practices and wanted to understand what collaboration across departments looked like and how an issue as sensitive as police violence could be addressed in a museum in a city where a murder at the hands of police had recently occurred. The themes of gun and police violence will always be challenging to sit with, but through heuristic inquiry, the art connected me to my intuitive self, my body felt that the art supported processes of moving through difficult encounters.

For this study, heuristics made room for the nuance of the unfelt senses, such as intuition, déjà vu, and premonitions that the art elicited (Moustakas, 1990; Springgay, 2022). Writings by Sultan (2019), Douglass & Moustakas (1985), and Moustakas’s seminal work (1990) on heuristics guided the data interpretation, while Sela-Smith’s (2002) clear explanations of the six stages of the heuristic process supported Sultan and pushed through Moustakas to keep the focus of the self in the interpretation. As Sultan emphasized in italics (2019), “the primary purpose behind heuristic data analysis is to understand, with a vision to cocreate new knowledge, make meaning, and foster individual and collective transformation” (p. 146). Cocreating meaning is what happens within collaborative teams.

Collaboration, in which all voices are heard and considered, is an act of cocreating meaning. Massumi referred to the energy of affect as an expression that moves through bodies and objects (2002), temporarily swirling around the affected site, generating energy and causing the past to collide with the present (1995). When this energetic force collides with difference, the force is filled with possibility (Deleuze, 1968, 1994). In this paper I refer to this affective collision as an encounter. The interview questions sought to understand the energetic flow during the planning and execution of Promise Witness Remembrance and how, if at all, the exhibition impacted antiracist practices in the museum. Heuristic inquiry then helped me connect how Promise Witness Remembrance and In the Garden were related in themes and execution. Most importantly, I wondered if the experience of working with the Amy Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor in these exhibitions shifted how people and institutions respond to racial differences.

The exhibition centered around the portrait Breonna Taylor painted by Amy Sherald, after she was commissioned by the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, to be used for the cover of Vanity Fair’s September 2020 issue, about six months after Taylor was murdered by police in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. This convergence of the portrait appearing in the magazine motivated a staffer at The Speed Museum, the oldest museum in Louisville, to suggest displaying The Portrait at the museum. She knew this was an opportunity for people from Taylor’s hometown to bear witness to the portrait. Conversations around organizing evolved from this place, as did the planning for the Promise Witness Remembrance. An energy swirls around this portrait. It helped open up discourse and became a force of resurrecting and reckoning with a city and nation’s legacy of gun and police violence.