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Since 2003, visual artist Carey Young has developed a body of artistic work across multiple media that examines law’s relationship to ideas of space, language, performance, and materiality. Her talk will centre on a screening of Young’s noted video Palais de Justice (2017), in which the artist spent two years surreptitiously filming female judges and lawyers working at the main courthouse of Belgium. Using a painterly, hallucinatory aesthetic, the piece evokes a legal system centred on or controlled by women and explores intersections of power, gender and the ocular. Young will also include other examples of her law-based artistic works, which have conceptualised and explored law as an artistic medium. Young has collaborated with legal advisors to make artworks in installation, video, performance, print, sculpture, and photography, which also operate as bespoke legal instruments. These works have addressed disparate legal fields, including human rights, inheritance law, intellectual property and law relating to outer space. Experimenting with ideas of space, time, and materiality in relation to law, Young’s artistic work explores law as a separate kind of ‘reality’, one with its own inherent subjectivities and points of breakdown.

Young’s talk will be followed by a conversation with Desmond Manderson (ANU), and an open Q&A session. The workshop will be moderated by Steven Howe (Lucerne).

* Since sound is a major aspect of the work, headphones are recommended for the best experience of ‘Palais de Justice’. * 

The event forms part of the 24-hour virtual workshop For One Day Only: Law, Space, Matter

Carey Young is based in London, UK. An Associate Professor in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, she is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Law, Birkbeck, and has a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship through 2022. Young’s solo exhibitions include Dallas Museum of Art (2017), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2013), Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, and The Power Plant, Toronto (both 2009). Group shows include Busan Biennial (2020), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019), Centre Pompidou (2018, 2015), New Museum, NYC (2011), MoMA/PS1, NYC (2010), Tate Britain (2010) and many others. She was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists 2021 and is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. www.careyyoung.com

Desmond Manderson FRSC, FAAL, FASSA is jointly appointed in the Australian National University College of Law and College of Arts & Social Sciences. He directs the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, designing innovative interdisciplinary courses with English, philosophy, art theory and history, political and critical theory, and beyond. His most recent book, Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts received the 2019 Penny Pether Prize for research in law and the humanities, and the 2020 Australian Legal Research Award for best book.  He has taken the forced covid reset to explore new possibilities. Twenty Minutes with the Devil(with Luis Gomez Romero) premieres at The Street Theatre in November 2021.