Justine Sohm File

In the end, Justine Sohm’s essay is not merely written on paper; it is written in the arrangements of galleries, the selections of films, and the unflinching questions she posed to every image. Her legacy is the uncomfortable space she cleared for art to be more than beautiful, more than clever—to be, in her own words, “a splinter in the eye of the comfortable.” For that alone, she deserves a long and patient look.

To assess Justine Sohm today is to recognize a figure who was ahead of her time in the most inconvenient way possible. In an era that celebrates “artivism” and socially engaged practice, her concerns have become mainstream. Major biennials now routinely feature works about migration, police brutality, and ecological collapse. Museum curators speak earnestly about “ethical spectatorship.” In this sense, Sohm won. But winning, for her, would have been a suspect category. What she offers contemporary readers and practitioners is not a set of answers but a relentless method: the demand that we look at art with our full historical and moral selves intact. She reminds us that the frame of a painting, the walls of a gallery, the duration of a film—these are not neutral containers. They are borders that can either conceal or reveal. And it is the critic’s job, the curator’s duty, and the citizen’s responsibility to stand at that edge and ask: what lies beyond, and why have we chosen not to see it? justine sohm

Perhaps the most significant, and most under-examined, aspect of Sohm’s legacy is her work in documentary film. Between 1978 and 1985, she produced a trilogy of films on artists whose work engaged with political violence: The Witness: Käthe Kollwitz’s Century , Fragments of Hans Haacke , and Martha Rosler: The Kitchen of War . Unlike conventional art documentaries, which tend to fetishize the artist’s studio or biography, Sohm’s films are relentlessly interrogative. She uses the camera not as a window but as a mirror, turning it back on the viewer’s own complacency. In The Witness , for example, she juxtaposes Kollwitz’s prints of starving children with contemporary news footage of famine in Biafra, asking a narrator to repeat the question: “And what did you do?” The films are difficult, uncomfortable viewing—deliberately so. They refuse the redemptive arc, the comforting conclusion that art has made things better. For Sohm, art’s function was not to heal but to indict. In the end, Justine Sohm’s essay is not