Visualizing law's pluralities: artistic practice and legal culture

Abstract

This essay presents and analyzes an exhibition on Law s Pluralities. The exhibition was an integral part of the academic conference Law s Pluralities: Cultures/Narratives/Images/Genders that was held at the University of Giessen in 2015. It explains relevant curatorial decisions and discusses contemporary artistic positions involved in dealing with the pluralities of law and legal cultures. Further, the essay examines strategies for visualizing, interrogating, and subverting the law and legal practices. Some of the artworks documented in the exhibition challenge the increasing use of surveillance practices in public spaces and question the legal framework of these practices. These works make use of privacy legislation to open up surveillance systems otherwise closed circuits to the public. Alternatively, they question their authority by reclaiming spaces under surveillance as stages for performative interventions. Still other works focus on the concrete, written nature of law, and propose alternative visualizations and readings of legal texts and symbols. The essay argues that artistic works represent powerful means for uncovering the pluralities of law as cultural constructions.