Carey Young

Carey Young is a Humanities Cultural Programme Visiting Fellow 2023.

This fellowship is in partnership with Modern Art Oxford.

Carey Young is a London-based visual artist with 20 years research within law. Young works across video, photography, text, performance and installation explores relations between the body, language, rhetoric, and systems of power. Since 2002 Young has used deep 'field research' with lawyers, law firms and legal theorists, creating critical, conceptual works which address law and justice in the light of artistic foci such as landscape, site, portraiture or the sublime. Since 2016, her interest expanded to include a lens-based approach, using photography and video to explore legal architecture in relation to gender and performance.

This fellowship runs alongside Carey Young's solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford 25 March - 2 July 2023. The exhibition will focus on female identity, with three related video works depicting women working in law and industry, which invite viewers into new perceptions of systemic power, gender and justice. The exhibition includes a new video installation, Appearance (2022), a slow-motion portrait of diverse female judges, along with The Vision Machine (2020), Young's inventive exploration of female identity in relation to the fields of photography and cinema, and Palais de Justice (2017), a dreamlike evocation of a court or legal system run by women. An associated selection of Young's compelling text and photographic works will connect law, power and visual culture.

The fellowship will also include a one day symposium, held at Modern Art Oxford on Friday 19th May. The symposium will bring together practitioners, creatives, academics and legal professionals to discuss the relationship between fiction, art and law and discuss the relationship between photography and gender power. The symposium is open to all and will include a drinks reception and viewing of the exhibition.

Images and further info at www.careyyoung.com

Image credit: Appearance, Carey Young, 2023. HD video (from 4K), 49 mins 30 secs.

Principal Investigator:

Ian Kiaer, Professor of Fine Art and the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Ruskin School of Art; he is a Fellow of Brasenose College.

Ian Kiaer makes fragile installations involving groupings of architectural models, untouched or slightly modified found objects, and two-dimensional work to create fragmented narratives. These works are prompted by the ideas of utopian thinkers, architects, and artists from various periods of history whose common concern has been their resistance and critique of dominant ideologies – while providing possible alternatives for thought. Kiaer’s installations often operate as projects or proposals and continue to employ the fragment as a means of questioning notions of totality and permanence.

Ian’s doctoral thesis was entitled Endless House: Models of Thought for Dwelling. He researched the question of the house as model of thought, looking in particular at Curzio Malaparte’s Casa Malaparte, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Kundmangasse, Konstantin Melnikov’s Cylindrical House Studio, and Frederick Kiesler’s unbuilt notion of the ‘Endless House’. Since then, he has become interested in thinking about how the model can inform an understanding of painting as a ‘minor form’, where notions such as tone and timbre operate on the fringes of a potentially redundant practice.

Ian has exhibited internationally since 2000, with solo exhibitions at institutions including Tate Britain, London; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; Kunstverein München, Munich; and Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice. He has also exhibited at the Venice Biennale (50th), Istanbul Biennale (10th), Berlin Biennale (4th), Lyon Bienniale (10th) and Manifesta 3. Ian previously taught at the Royal College of Art.