Legal Abstraction on Trial A number of current practices seek to “put the law on trial,” often using the form of the activist tribunal. While those have a pedigree in older “people’s tribunals,” the political aesthetics of the tribunal form has been articulated in new ways by a number of contemporary artists, and coalitions including artists. This talk will focus on tribunals and the performative dimension of the juridical in order to unpack the ways in which these “para-legal” activities not only criticize specific failures of the judiciary, but also challenge the existing legal framework as such. Supplementing Marx’s account of the value-form, one can posit the “rights-form” as a type of real abstraction that shapes social reality. The rights-form divides the world into persons and property, and creates hierarchies between different kinds of persons, natural and artificial, human and corporate. Discussing artists and collectives including Forensic Architecture, Zachary Formwalt, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Abderrahmane Sissako, Jonas Staal and Radha d’Souza, this talk will argue that the deconstruction of the rights-form is a fundamental aspect of current aesthetic and political practice.
Sven Lütticken is an art historian. He is associate professor at Leiden University's Academy of Creative and Performing Arts / PhDArts, and he coordinates the research master's track Critical Studies in Art and Culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of a number of books, including History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (2013), and Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy(2017), and Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Volume 1 (2022), and the editor of the critical reader Art and Autonomy (2022).
Website: https://svenlutticken.org