“I suddenly understood the power of art to move people in a visceral way”

FALL 2025: What does it mean for an artist to think dangerously today?

Interview with Bill Shipsey, founder of Art for Human Rights, honorary member of the Board of the FALL 2025 festival, at DOX in Prague, October 2-5

FALL, short for Festival of Arts, Literature and Learning, is taking place for the third consecutive year at DOX in Prague, a vibrant center for exploring contemporary themes through art. Art for Human Rights, formerly Art for Amnesty, is an organization founded on the belief that the work of artists can help create a better future, because their thinking, by nature and instinct, is non-conformist and can strike viscerally, opening the way to a leap in knowledge and a desire for change. Bill Shipsey, a former lawyer and lifelong activist, founded it on his intuition in 2002 and has since tirelessly connected internationally renowned artists with organizations fighting for human rights.

• The artist’s gaze, by nature non-conformist, can lead to a leap in knowledge.

In its manifesto, FALL 2025 asks: what does it mean for an artist today to think dangerously? To think critically? To think subversively? To take risks? To not be afraid to define themselves, to position themselves, to take a stand? To put it in Camus’ words: “To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an era that forgives nothing.”

Bill, having worked alongside artists of all disciplines from around the world for 23 years, do you find that the current climate of 2025 is poisoning the art world, and that there is preemptive self-censorship taking place? I ask you this about the United States, which you frequent often for personal reasons, about Ireland, your home country, and about France, where you’ve lived for many years.
No, I don’t think that artists are poisoned by the challenges the human rights community faces globally today. On the contrary, in my experience, artists remain the most committed and involved, because they feel directly and clearly that interference with their right to express themselves prevents or limits their ability to create. If there is self-censorship by artists, I haven’t noticed it or experienced it.

• “Artists in the US have become even more outspoken and courageous in the Trump era”

Specifically, what is the climate like in the United States today?
I can’t speak with great authority about what is happening in the United States, but the American artists I know, young and old – including big names like Bruce Springsteen and Joan Baez – have, if anything, become even more courageous and outspoken since the advent of Trump.
The ongoing genocide unfolding in Gaza, in particular, has galvanized and is galvanizing support and activism from artists of all disciplines around the world.

The days of FALL 2025 will be filled with interventions from authors, from Daniel Kehlmann, who in his latest book, “The Director,” explores the relationship between art and power, to the exiled Chinese dissident Badiucao and the journalist Melissa Chan, who co-wrote the graphic novel “You Must Take Part in Revolution”, to Paul Lynch, who in his “Prophet Song” stages a dystopian Ireland plunged into totalitarianism, to Adania Shibli, the Palestinian writer and poet whose award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023 was canceled after the October 7 massacre, citing “insensitive timing.” Just to name a few.

• Art helps convey the message of human rights “from the arteries to the capillaries”

Bill, to quote the great poet Seamus Heaney, who was also a dear friend of yours, art helps convey the message of human rights “from the arteries to the capillaries.” I remember that the intuition behind Art for Human Rights arose from a strong personal experience of yours: what suddenly reached your capillaries one day?
I was 19 years old when I participated in my first action for Amnesty; it was the 50th anniversary of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and we were protesting against the death penalty outside San Quentin prison. Joan Baez, whom I had already met as a member of a peace group at my university in Dublin, was singing at the rally with her sister Mimi Farina. It was then that I suddenly understood the power of art (in this case, in the form of music) to move people in a visceral and emotional way, something that law or conventions that appeal to the cerebral senses cannot do.

And then?
I worked for a year in a law firm in California defending those condemned to death, then returned to Ireland to practice law. The Irish section of Amnesty International, of which I became president, organized an auction of works by Artists for Amnesty. Then came the concerts by U2, The Police, Peter Gabriel, Joan Baez, Lou Reid, and later Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman, and Youssou N’Dour, all to raise money for Amnesty… I asked Irene Khan, who was then the Secretary General of Amnesty, what she could do if I managed to raise $10 million for Amnesty through artists, and she replied, “a mountain of things!” That’s how Art for Amnesty was born, later transforming into Art for Human Rights in 2022, collaborating not only with Amnesty but with all the organizations that defend human rights.

How did your interest in this festival arise?
Art for Human Rights has been connected to DOX for 15 years, precisely since it was founded. Leos Valka, the founder, came to Dublin for an Art for Human Rights event in 2004, and a strong friendship immediately developed there. The same is true with Michaela Silpocova, Leos’ partner in life as well, the artistic director of the Center, and the creator of FALL. Michaela primarily studies and analyzes the relationships between visual art and literature, curates the literary program of DOX, and is responsible for its interdisciplinary approach to the arts. Art for Amnesty, as we were then called, has collaborated with DOX on numerous projects before this one, such as an exhibition by Peter Sis, one by Art 19, and others. DOX also displayed the first bronze bust of Liu Xiaobo, which I commissioned in 2019. And it is still on display there at DOX, much to the dismay of the Chinese embassy!

During FALL 2025, many workshops will take place under the heading of Learning, where “learning” stands for knowledge of others and oneself, through the exchange of personal stories. This is the philosophy of Narrative4, the brainchild of the great writer Colum McCann, an Irishman like you, albeit transplanted to New York.
I myself introduced Colum to Michaela, and a great collaboration has developed since then. In the FALL 2023 edition, Art for Human Rights also sponsored the flights of Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, the protagonists of Apeirogon, Colum’s latest novel, two fathers (in Italian, there is no word to say bereaved parents, in this case due to acts of terrorism), one Israeli and the other Palestinian.

• The Republic of Conscience

Bill, if you had to define the connection between artists and human rights, what words would you use?
I would use some of those spoken by Seamus Heaney when introducing one of our events: “…there is the feeling that good spirits from the republic of conscience and from the land of art have gathered for the right reasons in the right place… not for a cause but for a credo… a disposition rather than a party line. And the disposition is this: we are disposed to believe that the work of artists helps to create our future. We believe that the effort of creative individuals can promote a new order of understanding in the common mind, an understanding that precedes and prepares for the establishment of new social and, indeed, new legislative conditions.”