Law & Video Art

Artists and academics will meet to 

discuss how video art and law can 

engage in new critical and creative ways.

Participating Artists 

Ifor Duncan - https://hscif.org/duncan/ 

Helene Kazan - http://www.helenekazan.co.uk/ 

Mhamad Safa - https://www.mhamadsafa.com/ 

Nicole Zilberszac - https://www.instagram.com/nicole_noze_arts/?hl=en 

Works by the artists will be shown and followed by open discussions without panels, where the participating audience will be able to get involved.  

Participating Commentators who will kickstart the discussions after each film: Eray Cayli, Anna Chronopoulou, Julia Chryssostalis, Lucy Finchett-Maddock, Matthias Kispert, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, and others.  

Law and Video Art is a nascent interdisciplinary genre of research, where connections between representation, movement and materiality on the one hand, and linguistics, normativities and legal theories are emerging. In this session, we are engaging with video art that engages with law explicitly or implicitly, but without fetishising the law as either the grand textual arbiter or only as a symbolic space and procedure that takes place in courtrooms. 

Rather, we are encouraging an open, spectrum-like conception of law that includes behavioural norms, ethics, material and geographical restrictions and directions, affective and sensorially attuned laws, elemental movement, conflict.   

Some of the questions we shall try to address during the day are: 

• what’s the movement of the law? Where in movement of bodies is there law? 
• what is the connection between visual representation and law? 
• what’s the connection between the gaze of the director/artist and the lawmaker? 
• does video art allow for an escape from law? Does it confirm the existing law? Does it imagine a new law? 
• what is the temporality of video art in relation to that of the law? 
• what is the law of elements? How does the movement of elements (air water etc) gets inscribed onto law?
• is there a legal atmosphere that video art captures better or different to other forms of artistic practices? 

The event is also an occasion to officially welcome Dr Helene Kazan in her post as the first Artist in Residence of the Westminster Law & Theory Lab and The Westminster Law School. Dr Kazan will be working along the Lab until February 2023. 

Free but limited spaces. Evenbrite tickets available here.