Polyphonic worlds: justice as medium

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Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium

Bodies Before the Law

We appear to be caught in an impasse within the throes of destabilizing events that have unhinged the body politic. While the logic of spectral return lurks within the present breaking point—this moment is fuelled by accelerated rage and slow violence; and is set amid the doubly threatening conditions of forced displacement from war-ravaged territories and the swelling reach of far-right statecraft.

How to distinguish between the deep historical injustices of colonial modernity, settler governance, and mercantile empire, and the current operations of neoliberal capitalism that pronounce conditions of injustice in the familiar tenor of historical experience yet persist with a transformed planetary vigor and a reconstituted means of language, while taking planetary effect?

Contour Biennale 8 departs from the historic grounds of the Great Council, established in Mechelen during the fifteenth century; an emblematic reminder of the court architecture that first sought to address the Low Countries through rational jurisprudence. Here, law was not only spoken but enacted as a regional force across Dutch, German, and French territories. The modern world brought together through the Western system of nation-states is intrinsically tied to the progression of European law and enlightenment principles of rationality around legal representation. From the vestiges of this judicial infrastructure, the biennale investigates the field of social justice and its implements as media archaeology, such that justice itself is considered a “medium” that is simultaneously a performative, ethical, and aesthetic operation.

The graphic identity of “Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium,” designed by Studio Remco van Bladel, contains a symbolic intervention: the dynamic moiré pattern composing a circle, which can be viewed as a lens but also as a forum for assembling thoughts and actions. This multistable image transforms throughout the exhibition and publications, and is released into the city. It works as a reminder that the materiality of global justice is not merely enacted as an official manifestation of rights and duties, but also as a complex process of political and aesthetic resistance, which strives to convey its opacity through differentiated mutation and refusal in the face of the state’s transparent forms of disciplinary power. Eventually, conveying how the grounds of law flicker between visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion, and protection and punishment.

Polyphonic music was integral to medieval and late medieval Flemish culture, to the extent that its locus rested among figures of power and distinction as well as in the popular domain—connecting scribes and composers to architectures of the royal court, the church, and the street. Across the biennale this notion of polyphony is activated as a parallel field of resonance in order to examine and unravel formalizations in the character of the witness and testimonial production, the course of narrative-formation and the presence of silence in the trial, as well as the role of fiction and orality in evidence. Within the biennale, however, the emphasis remains on human experience and sentient environments rather than a unilateral obsession with the abstract formless dimension of law. “Polyphonic Worlds” fosters the idea of “undisciplinarity” in such a way that several entangled positions from contemporary culture perform as non-linear praxes across horizons of thought and artistic media, while becoming linked in an affective bind.

Rather than focusing entirely on individual artistic production, this edition of the biennale is a moment for a number of collectives to partake in shared deliberation, informal exchanges, durational research, and process-based contributions. The question of approaching justice is one that necessitates the critical plenitude of sparring partners and the irregular alignments of a multitude. This attitude seeks to engage with vital questions of livability, since even today’s precariousness is defined by: “the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all.”

Shifting Assemblages

The courtroom has long been compared to the theater and its processes described as maintaining a theatrical form. As participating artists reanimate the terrain of the courtroom and its historical surround, they are accompanied by an added scenographic element by exhibition designer Richard Venlet, which converts the exhibition venue entrances into mirrored façades. This sensory threshold invites the visitor to consider the elemental frontier of the self and the world while reflecting upon the theatrical core of the legal apparatus. Our motive is to foreground a visceral mode of politics that resounds through dissonant ways of being in the world, and to attend to a rehabilitation of the body—its affects, emotions, passions—such that the exhibition acknowledges itself as a meta-body in civic space amidst the institutional dynamic of segregation and alienation that normalizes certain bodies while also rejecting racialized, sexualized, and differently-abled bodies.

With the limits of justice now unraveling in a volatile crisis of ethics in the global present, Contour Biennale 8 engages a polyphonic view that recalls the acoustic history of the Lowlands while presenting a notational landscape that is multiphonic, carrying overtones that are heard as a plural consciousness, and at times as states of discord. This edition sets out to question the preconceived boundaries between the perception of legality and illegality within today’s experience of statehood.

In recasting “Justice as Medium,” we are summoning those black sites, missing records, censored witnesses, and planetary testimonies that are elided by juridical-political agents and the legal grounds on which they function. Perhaps the role of the artistic imagination is not to directly represent prosecutor or defendant in the dominant juridical structure, but rather consistently mark the set of relations and means by which matters of justice are cast into figuration and acoustic expression in our unevenly distributed, common reality.

It has been said, time and again: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice…”


Natasha Ginwala


Contour Biennale 8 Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium will be on view from 11 March until 21 May 2017. The exhibition is open from 9 to 17 h during weekdays, and between 10 and 18 h on weekends. The Biennale is closed on Wednesdays.

Events

19-05-2017 — 12:05

Agency: Assembly (Polyphonic Worlds)

May 20 and May 21, 15:00–17:00

Agency will host two gatherings to respond to readings of legal case questions.


Venue: Alderman’s House, Steenweg 1, Mechelen.

RSVP required due to limited seating via contour@nona.be.

Art practices often involve non-humans (animals, birds, plants, rocks, etc…) and other-than-humans (death, spirits, extra and intra terrestrials, etc…). Yet, intellectual property is only reserved for humans. Although the copyright law definition of “authors” does not explicitly refer to humans, the jurisprudence doesn't consider non-humans and other-than-humans as possible “causes of art works”. What if non-humans and other-than-humans become mutually included within art practices? For Assembly (Polyphonic Worlds) Agency will depart from this speculation by invoking two cases:


On Saturday, May 20, Agency invokes Thing 001652 (Monkey's Selfies), which concerns a controversy between the macaque Naruto represented by the animal rights organization PETA and the wildlife photographer David Slater around a series of photos made by Naruto and published inside a book of David Slater. Respondents: Sari Depreeuw (intellectual property law), Steven Humblet (art history), Jane Reniers (animal rights), Anna Vanhellemont (animal law), Jan Verpooten (ethology)


On Sunday, May 21, Agency invokes Thing 001621 (Dead Son Drawn by Psychic Artist), a conflict between the psychic artist Frank Leah and A.P. about a journal reproduction of a picture of a drawing of the spirit of the son of A.P. by Frank Leah. Respondents: Mieke Abel (clairvoyance), Julien Cabay (intellectual property law), Steve Michiels (cartoonist), Florentine Peeters (art), Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans (art history), Christian Vandekerkhove (theosophy), Jana Willems (psychic art)


During each gathering, Agency invites a group of concerned practitioners to respond to the court cases. Rather than re-enacting the trial, these assemblies invoke moments of hesitation during the case hearing.


The Assemblies take place between 15h and 17h on May 20 and 21 in English language.

Check the event on Facebook.

26-04-2017 — 05:04

Nocturne

Op woensdag 26 april organiseert Contour Biennale 8 een nocturne. Alle locaties zijn dan geopend van 17 tot 21 uur: een ideaal moment om de biënnale te bezoeken naast de gangbare openingsuren. Je kan ook tijdens deze avond een gids reserveren via contour@nona.be

20-03-2017 — 04:03

Café Univers

Café Univers is a nomadic radio project by Syma Tariq and Francesca Savoldi hosted during the opening weekend of Contour Biennale 8.

The episodes navigate mainstream radio stations via the Radio Garden, with biennale artists, guests and passersby warmly invited to contribute. The project melds sonic exploration of south/south solidarity and the collapsing of physical/digital spaces via the changing format of radio. It hopes to address questions such as: What is the relationship between music and social justice? In what ways does music (re)territorialise and bind the diaspora? Whose sound is it anyway?

The project is supported by Radio Apartment 22 (R22), founded by Abdellah Karroum in Rabat. Edited episodes of the audio recorded will be published on R22 and the Contour Biennale 8 website.

20-03-2017 — 03:03

Lerarendag

Op zondag 19 maart organiseerden Contour Biennale 8 en OP.RECHT.MECHELEN. de Contour Biennale 8 lerarendag in samenwerking met Klasse. De educatieve werking van de biënnale werd er voorgesteld. De educatie map is vanaf nu beschikbaar op onze website.

13-03-2017 — 07:03

The Stealing C*nt$ and Toxic Sovereignty

The Karrabing Film Collective (Gavin Bianamu, Rex Edmunds, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Ben Williams) presents The Stealing C*nt$ and Toxic Sovereignty at the Boghossian Foundation on the occasion of their participation in Contour Biennale 8. The screening will be followed by a talk moderated by Natasha Ginwala. Please find all information here.

11-03-2017 — 07:03

Public Programme

Contour Biennale 8 collaborates with Dutch Art Institute for a two-day Public Programme organized on March 11-12, 2017 entitled Planetary Records: Performing Justice Between Art and Law with a dynamic schedule of keynote lectures, artist talks, film presentations and performance as part of DAI’s Roaming Assembly #12 conceived by biennale curator Natasha Ginwala and poet, critic-curator Rachel O’Reilly. All information is on our website under 'public programme'.

Hearings

16-05-2017

The Moon Will Teach You

Some of the most prominent music produced in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was linked to the spread of polyphonic choral compositions. This music was usually interpreted from handwritten parts in the form of choir books with music and lyrics laid out for individual voices (typically soprano and tenor on the left-hand pages, and alto and bass on the right-hand pages). While at this time the printing press [...]

15-05-2017

OTHER

Other began as an ongoing project initiated for the exhibition 10 x 10 (2014), which was presented at Haus Esters in Krefeld, a modernist villa designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the silk manufacturer Josef Esters. In an exploration of how institutional structures are imposed on individuals, the first textile series combines features of automated mechanical manufacturing with conceptual and technological aspects of how large datasets are collected and processed. [...]

06-03-2017

Video Temporality and Hindsight Evidence

Since 1991, when Rodney King’s beating was captured on video by a civilian named George Holliday, the medium’s use as legal evidence has increased immensely. Understanding the functions and consequences of this shift demands a deep consideration of video’s relationship to temporality and memory. For years, artists and media theorists have been pursuing this question. […]

06-03-2017

L for Lai Teck

A fleet of illegible and nameless specters haunts the political landscapes of early and mid-twentieth-century Southeast Asia. British Special Branch reports from this period tended to present its Communist enemies as faceless statistical digits, revealing few personal details about them. The abstraction of these reports is further exacerbated by the fact that the most frequent […]

06-03-2017

Diaoptasia – Our Future Will Be

Fractures can sometimes be identified As light falls on its aching path How do you see the cracks that appear? Would it be rough and irregular? Maybe shell like, smooth and curved? Or maybe jagged and sharp edged like broken metal Forming elongated splinters Breaking like clay or chalk? Our future is to live […]

06-03-2017

I Will Burn Myself Again and Again: Notes on the Self-Immolations in Tibet

I am walking thus on the path of light, to become the living proof of truth I am sacrificing myself thus on the face of actuality All my brothers and sisters, young and old, living in misery and sorrow All people throughout the world who love freedom and peace And to you, tyrants of violence, […]

06-03-2017

Visual Script: Vietnam the Movie

—Did you see her? —The lobby was full of people. Police, security, barriers. I realized how ridiculous the situation was. I pictured myself jumping on an Indo-Chinese woman, yelling: “Mama!” So I thought a miracle had to happen. I hoped one of the women would shout: “Etienne, my son!” I waited. A long time.[…]

06-03-2017

A Tragedy in Two Acts

This is a slightly adapted version of a conversation that took place over e-mail in 2006 between art historian Els Roelandt and visual artist Ana Torfs, on the occasion of the first exhibition of Torfs’ installation Anatomy at daadgalerie in Berlin.

06-03-2017

America, de Bry 1590-1634

Whilst sitting in the rare book division of the New York Public Library in Manhattan, awaiting the arrival of an original 1724 edition of Le Code Noir, I picked up another book: America, de Bry 1590-1634. As I moved through the pages, looking at Theodor de Bry’s coloured engravings, I was witnessing documents from history that reported apparent truths about the colonisation of the Americas […]