Nicki Lees: On making the invisible visible
In this episode, we talk with Nicki Lees on making the invisible visible. She explores how art can be used as an outlet for seeking accountability and recognition for those who have been failed by the law. She highlights the importance of putting people with lived experience at the forefront of a project. Throughout this episode, Nicki discusses the ethical and legal challenges she has faced when working with AI while producing the Exhibit AI.
What does photography ethics mean to Nicki?
“Whether it’s law, or visual media – and it’s been so interesting how closely those issues are related – it’s about putting your client, or the person you’re representing, or the person at the other end of the lens, or the person at the other end of the phone call, or whatever project you’re doing. It’s about doing justice to what they want and to honour the fact that they’re sharing their story with you, or they’re giving you their image, or whatever it might be and taking the time to amplify what that is.” (39:38)
Nicki Lees is a Special Counsel in the Social Justice Practice at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers in Melbourne, Australia. Over the past 8 years, she has run litigation challenging the legality of the detention of children and the wider conditions that refugees are held in within detention centres. She has also led cases regarding the protection of First Nations rights. Nicki was involved in the creation of Exhibit A-I, a project collating dozens of witness statements of life in Australia's offshore processing centres for refugees. In partnership with the witnesses themselves, these statements were fed into AI technology to generate images of life in the regional processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island. Nicki holds a Masters in International Law (with Distinction) from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Nicki is the Chair of the Australian Lawyers' Alliance Human Rights Committee and an Advisory Council member of the Stateless Children Australia Network.
You can see Exhibit AI at https://www.exhibitai.com.au