UNESCO Human Rights

Visualizing Universalism probes the archive of the UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition. Designed for travel to multiple locations, the 1949 exhibition was conceived as a vehicle for disseminating the content of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” (UDHR) adopted one year prior. The portable exhibition package contained an album with 110 images illustrating episodes within the history of human rights, a printed copy of the UDHR, and an instruction manual offering suggestions for the installation of the exhibition content.

Today, the moral language of “human rights” appears so natural to our contemporary sensibilities that we rarely question its history and universal applicability. However, an inquiry into the UNESCO Human Rights Exhibition reveals that the international propagation of a novel moral language proved a significant challenge. At the time of the adoption of the UDHR, the idea of human rights did not yet imply a given moral vocabulary; this had to be invented. Thus, an eclectic organizing committee–comprising bureaucrats, intellectuals and architects–sought to embellish the abstract idea of human rights with tangible visual content implying a universally shared, progressive history.

The full contents of the traveling exhibition package are displayed in this room. In the South Gallery are installation photographs from the inaugural 1949 Paris exhibition, photographs of the traveling show in Berlin, (list all), and documents from the UNESCO archives that reveal the struggle to formalize and visualize human rights as a universal history of humanity.