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19 May 2023
9:30 am
-
6:00 pm

Carey Young: Vision and Justice

Join us for a day of inspiring conversation and events, expanding on the themes of Carey Young’s exhibition Appearance.

In this exciting interdisciplinary day event, art historians, legal theorists and women judges will discuss the themes in Young’s exhibition, including relations between law, images and fiction, and between power, gender and the cinematic.

The line up includes a mixture of art historians, legal theorists and judges, including Prof. Geoffrey Batchen, Dr. Catherine Grant, Prof. Des Manderson, Dr. Valérie Hayaert, Leslie Primo and Wendy Joseph KC. The full line-up to be announced very soon. The event is presented by Carey Young as part of her Visiting Fellowship with TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities).

Tickets are £5, free for students, and include light refreshments throughout the day. The event will be hosted at Modern Art Oxford.

Click here to find out more about Carey Young: Appearance, on display at Modern Art Oxford until 2 July.


We offer a range of facilities to ensure we are accessible to visitors. Please click here to find out more about visiting Modern Art Oxford. If you have any questions about your visit, please get in touch at info@modernartoxford.org.uk.

9.30 – 10 am
Arrival with tea/coffee

10.00 – 10.10 am
Welcome and introductions

10.10 – 11.40 am
Panel 1: Beyond Art Law: Law, Visuality and Art
This panel will reflect on law’s overlaps with art – well beyond ‘art law’ as such, and into the realm of the complex iconography and aesthetics of law, and its inspiration for works in Young’s exhibition.

Chair: Anthony Gardner (The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford)
Panellists: Desmond Manderson (Director, Centre for Law, Arts and Humanities, Australian National University): ‘Time, Law, and the Visual Arts’
Dr. Valerie Hayaert (Research Fellow, School of Law, University Of Warwick): ‘Lady Justice’s Mute Eloquence’
Carey Young (Artist): ‘Vision and Justice’

11.40 – 11.55 pm
Break

11.55 – 12.50 pm
Keynote: Geoffrey Batchen (Prof. of Art History, Oxford University): ‘The Look of Law’
Respondent: Yasufumi Nakamori (Senior Curator of International Art [Photography], Tate Modern)

12.50 – 1.50 pm
Lunch

1.50 – 2.30 pm
Keynote: Leslie Primo (independent scholar): ‘Portraiture in the Canon of Art History: Representation, Reputation and Appearance’

2.30 – 3.30 pm
Keynote: Dr. Catherine Grant (Reader, The Courtauld Institute of Art): ‘Women, Work and Power: Carey Young’s recent videos’

3.30 – 3.45 pm
Break

3.45 – 4.45 pm
Panel 2: Fictions and Law
Three judges who participated in Young’s video ‘Appearance’ (2023) consider their experience of being in the work, with wider reflection on the relations between law, judging, theatricality, performance and fiction, with wider comments by art historian and trained lawyer Joan Kee.
Chair: Carey Young (Artist)
Panellists:  Wendy Joseph KC
Professor Joan Kee (Dept. of History of Art, University of Michigan)

4.45 – 5 pm
Closing comments

5 – 6 pm
Drinks reception

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. He specialises in the history of photography. His most recent book is Inventing Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian Publishing, 2023).

Anthony Gardner is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford, where he was the Head of the Ruskin School of Art from 2017 to 2020 and is currently the Director of Graduate Studies. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, with articles in On Curating, ARTMargins, Third Text, Postcolonial Studies and many other journals and anthologies. Among his books are Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations (Melbourne, 2013), Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, also through MIT Press in 2015, the anthology Neue Slowenische Kunst: From Kapital to Capital. In 2016, he co-authored (with Charles Green, University of Melbourne) Biennials, Triennials and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art, published by Wiley-Blackwell. He holds a law degree from the University of Melbourne.

Catherine Grant is the author of A Time of One’s Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art (2022), and co-editor of Fandom as Methodology (2019), Creative Writing and Art History (2012), and the questionnaire on “Decolonizing Art History”, Art History, 2020. She is a co-lead for two research networks: “Group Work: Feminism and Contemporary Art” and “Animating Archives”.

Valérie Hayaert is Research Fellow  at the Criminal Justice Centre of the University of Warwick. In 2015 her book Genealogies of Legal Vision (Routledge) was published, a volume co-edited with Peter Goodrich. In 2017 and 2018, she  contributed to two exhibitions in Belgium: The Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law & Justice in Context from the Middle Ages to the First World War at the at the Groeningen Museum of Bruges, and Call for Justice at the Museum Hof Van Buysleyden in Mechelen. Her new book Lady Justice: An Anatomy of Allegory is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press (Oct. 2023). Lady Justice: An Anatomy of Allegory leaves conventional readings of this pivotal figure in European legal history far behind. Hayaert’s study brings together an analysis of thousands of images from the period 1400 – 1600, many of them previously overlooked, including artwork, frontispieces, legal texts, sculptures and statues in public spaces and in court buildings scattered across six countries. Lady Justice is taken apart and considered afresh – organ by organ, limb by limb, digit by digit, making a case for a treatment of allegory in all its complexity, ambiguity and affective force.

Until March 2022 Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC was a judge at the Old Bailey, sitting on criminal cases, trying mainly allegations of murder and other homicide. She read English and Law at Cambridge, was called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn in 1975, became a QC in 1998 and sat as a full-time judge from 2007 to 2022. When she moved to the Old Bailey in 2012 she was the only woman amongst sixteen judges, and only the third woman ever to hold a permanent position there. She was also a Diversity and Community Relations Judge, working to promote understanding between the judiciary and many different sectors of our community, particularly those from less privileged and minority groups. She mentors young people, from a variety of backgrounds, who hope for a career in law and has a special interest in helping women. Her book Unlawful Killings – Life, Love and Murder: Trials at the Old Bailey (Penguin 2023) is a Sunday Times Bestseller.

Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan and currently a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The author of numerous articles on contemporary art and law on topics such as artistic uses of police evidence, stalking and harassment, property laws and contemporary Chinese art, and artists’ rights. Her book Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America examines the relationship between contemporary art and the law through the lens of integrity, and how in the 1960s, artists began to engage conspicuously with legal ideas, rituals, and documents. She occasionally practices as a public interest lawyer in Detroit.

Professor Desmond Manderson is jointly appointed in the ANU Colleges of Law and of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He directs the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, designing innovative interdisciplinary courses in collaboration with colleagues in English, philosophy, art theory and history, political theory, and beyond. His recent work pioneers the intersection of law and the visual arts, notably in Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies and Critique (2018); and Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (2019).  His latest play, Twenty Minutes with the Devil (with Luis Gomez Romero) premiered at The Street Theatre, Canberra in June 2022.

Dr Yasufumi Nakamori is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography) at Tate Modern where he directs acquisitions of photography and is responsible for organizing exhibitions and displays of photography. Most recently, Nakamori curated the exhibition Zanele Muholi (2021). As a scholar of the modern and contemporary history of Japanese art and architecture, he has authored numerous essays and books including Eikoh Hosoe (2021) and Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture, Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro (2011). Previously he practiced corporate law in New York City and Tokyo.

Leslie Primo is an art historian, lecturer, author and broadcaster. He graduated from Birkbeck, University College, London with a BA in Art History and an Art History MA in Renaissance Studies. He specialises in early Medieval Art and Architecture, Italian Renaissance art, German art in the age of Reformation, Medici & Patronage, and mythology in the work of Peter Paul Rubens. Leslie worked as a lecturer at the National Gallery, London for 18 years, and in the same capacity at the National Portrait Gallery for 10 years. He has made a number of television and radio appearances, including the recent Art on the BBC series, speaking on the life of Michelangelo, and presenting a programme in the same series on JMW Turner. He was a guest panellist in Radio 4’s ‘Moving Pictures’ series. His literary work includes several contributions to the Oxford Companion Guide to Black British History (2007), an article for the Art UK website, ’Depicting the Magi: origins, gifts and representing men of colour’ (2018) and was the art history consultant for DK Life Stories: Leonardo da Vinci – a children’s book for ages 7-11 (2020). His new book The Foreigners that Invented British Art will be published by Thames & Hudson in 2024. He currently lectures for The Arts Society, and teaches a variety of art history courses at Imperial College London, the City Lit, London and The Course at the University Women’s Club, Mayfair.

Carey Young uses video, photography, text, print, performance and installation to explore relations between the body, language, rhetoric, and systems of power. Since 2002, she created a series of works which address and explore law, and which have involved collaborations with lawyers. Young’s work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2020), La Loge, Brussels (2019), Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2019), Dallas Museum of Art (2017), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2013), The Power Plant, Toronto (2009), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2009 & tour) and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2001). Group shows include Centre Pompidou (Paris and Brussels), New Museum (New York), Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, ICA (London) and Secession (Vienna), amongst many others. She participated in numerous biennials, including Busan, Moscow, Taipei, Sharjah and Venice, and received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2021.

Young’s works are held in major public collections including Tate, Arts Council Collection, Centre Pompidou, Sharjah Art Foundation and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst amongst others. Two monographs on her work have been published: Subject to Contract, (JRP|Ringier, 2013), and Carey Young: Incorporated, (Film and Video Umbrella and John Hansard Gallery, 2001). Her research fellowships include the Smithsonian, Washington DC; Wolfson College, University of Oxford; TORCH, University of Oxford; the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, and the Institut d’Études et de la Recherche sur le Droit et de la Justice, Paris. Young is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Carey Young: Appearance is on display at Modern Art Oxford until 2 July 2023.

Supporters

TORCH
This event is supported by TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, in partnership with Modern Art Oxford. The event has been programmed by Carey Young and Amy Budd, curator, Modern Art Oxford, on the occasion of Carey Young: Appearance, Young’s solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, March 25th - July 2nd 2023. Young currently has a Humanities Cultural Programme Visiting Fellowship through 2023.