“Due Process” Exhibition

Ludlow 38 / The Goethe-Institut New York

[Image: Amy Elkins "The Sunshine State" (data collected in 2010 / revisited and reworked in 2017)]

This event has ended.

Participating artists: Amy Elkins, Jesse Krimes, Per-Oskar Leu, Lucky Pierre, Jenny Polak, Gregory Sale, Dread Scott, Taryn Simon, jackie sumell

Curated by Alexandra Perloff-Giles

“Law,” wrote legal philosopher Robert Cover in his seminal essay Nomos and Narrative, “may be viewed as a system of tension or a bridge linking a concept of a reality to an imagined alternative.” The law, in other words, presupposes a chasm between the present parameters of legal authority and the redemptive promise of a justice that remains perpetually “à venir”.

The works in this exhibition explore that chasm. Even as they interrogate the ways in which the justice system and the penal system operate today, they simultaneously gesture toward the imaginary, the fictional, the counter-factual. Ultimately, in shuttling between the real and the “imagined alternative,” the exhibition invites us to reflect upon the role of the artist in politically charged times. Neither embracing art as a morally superior sphere nor decrying art’s powerlessness in the fact of legal and political challenges, it suggests that one of the most critical function of artists is to map our relationship to the institutions of justice we have erected — to shed light on “the gap between law as it is and law as it should be.”

Performance: The Lucullan Reading Circle - A performance by Per-Oskar Leu based on Bertolt Brecht’s Trial of LucullusThursday, September 6, 7pm, Goethe-Institut New York

Panel Discussion: with Rodricus Crawford, jackie sumell, and Brett Dignam, September 9, 4pm, Ludlow 38