Justice?
»Duane Hanson’s »Homeless Person« strikes us as very realistic and plays with the stereotype ideas that some of us maintain about people living at the margins of society.
Hanson demands us to take a close and questioning look that can lead to the question: What is a just society? This inevitably leads to the timeless »social question«. It was termed as such in the 19th century and refers to general and extensive social problems. But these issues have been inescapable already since the 18th century: poverty and injustices in densely populated areas increased to such a dramatic extent that many people were pushed to the margins of society or simply »fell between the cracks« and were left behind. Transferred to today, this work confronts us with the question of justice. In the same way that art time and again confronts us with wrongs and challenges structural (social) problems. It addresses and deals with resignation, fatigue and despair and thereby illustrates that such phenomena are not to be contained, neither temporally nor geographically.
Jasper Warzecha (research assistant)