This themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture examines the critical role that art and aesthetics play in processes of reparation. Invoking reparation in its multiple registers – as an act of repair, as the part that has been repaired, as a process of healing an injury, and as an act of justice – the articles and artist projects assembled in this issue move beyond the dominant juridical or financial definitions of reparations (definitions established by the colonial state, or by capitalist legal systems) to think and sense reparation as a singular verb: an active process oriented towards the future that does not lose sight of the ongoing ‘liveness’ of the colonial past.