What does it mean to desire, to stand before, to be subject to, the power of Law in a time of forever wars?

Before the Look of Law connects Kafka’s enigmatic depiction of law with Simon Leung’s 2006 curatorial project, Look of Law, to meditate on an unprecedented hostile takeover of the collective psyche by accelerated technologies of state/corporate/media collusion and their destruction of life and land, domestically and abroad.

Exhibition artworks, spanning the early 1990s to the present, reassemble the uncanny parts of real life that follow us into the place and time of waiting before the Law. Their aesthetic strategies are far-ranging: parrhesia to parody, speculative para-fiction to granular studies of materiality, redistributed auras of the indexical to extra-legal effects of the readymade. They operate in double-time and longue durée to place an arrest on “the present.” Each teaches us abiding lessons about disobedience, aesthetic, political and otherwise, at the edge of democracy and fascism.

Artists
York Chang, Tarik Garrett, Ashley Hunt, Zoe Leonard, Alberto Lule, Paul McCarthy, Na Mira, Sheila Pinkel, Cameron Rowland, Samar Al Summary, Tiffany Sia, Lincoln Tobier, Kiyan Williams, Kim Zumpfe & Luke Quezada

Read more about the artists and additional programming.