Carey Young: Vision and Justice Symposium

Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme in collaboration with Modern Art Oxford

Join Humanities Cultural Programme Visiting Fellow, Carey Young, for a day of inspiring conversation and events, expanding on the themes of Carey Young’s exhibition Appearance at Modern Art Oxford.

In this exciting interdisciplinary symposium, art historians, legal theorists and women judges will discuss the themes in Young’s exhibition, including relations between law, images and fiction, and between power, gender and the cinematic. Please see panel details below.

Location: Modern Art Oxford

Date: Friday 19th May 2023

Timings: 10.00am to 5.00pm (drinks reception 5.00pm-6.00pm)

Tickets: £5, and free for students (includes light refreshments throughout the day)

Book tickets here

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

carey_young_symposium_schedule_for_web.pdf

SPEAKER BIOS

Geoffrey Batchen, Prof. of Art History, University of Oxford

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. He specialises in the history of photography. His most recent book is Inventing Photography: William Henry Fox Talbot in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian Publishing, 2023).

Dr. Catherine Grant, Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art, Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Catherine Grant is the author of A Time of One’s Own: Histories of Feminism in Contemporary Art (2022), and co-editor of Fandom as Methodology (2019), Creative Writing and Art History (2012), and the questionnaire on “Decolonizing Art History”, Art History, 2020. She is a co-lead for two research networks: “Group Work: Feminism and Contemporary Art” and “Animating Archives”.

Dr. Valérie Hayaert, Research Fellow, School of Law, University of Warwick

Valérie Hayaert is Research Fellow at the Criminal Justice Centre of the University of Warwick. In 2015 her book Genealogies of Legal Vision (Routledge) was published, a volume co-edited with Peter Goodrich. In 2017 and 2018, she contributed to two exhibitions in Belgium: The Art of Law: Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law & Justice in Context from the Middle Ages to the First World War at the at the Groeningen Museum of Bruges, and Call for Justice at the Museum Hof Van Buysleyden in Mechelen. Her new book Lady Justice: An Anatomy of Allegory is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press (Oct. 2023). Lady Justice: An Anatomy of Allegory leaves conventional readings of this pivotal figure in European legal history far behind. Hayaert's study brings together an analysis of thousands of images from the period 1400 – 1600, many of them previously overlooked, including artwork, frontispieces, legal texts, sculptures and statues in public spaces and in court buildings scattered across six countries. Lady Justice is taken apart and considered afresh - organ by organ, limb by limb, digit by digit, making a case for a treatment of allegory in all its complexity, ambiguity and affective force.

Wendy Joseph KC
Until March 2022 Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC was a judge at the Old Bailey, sitting on criminal cases, trying mainly allegations of murder and other homicide. She read English and Law at Cambridge, was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn in 1975, became a QC in 1998 and sat as a full-time judge from 2007 to 2022. When she moved to the Old Bailey in 2012 she was the only woman amongst sixteen judges, and only the third woman ever to hold a permanent position there. She was also a Diversity and Community Relations Judge, working to promote understanding between the judiciary and many different sectors of our community, particularly those from less privileged and minority groups. She mentors young people, from a variety of backgrounds, who hope for a career in law and has a special interest in helping women. Her book Unlawful Killings - Life, Love and Murder: Trials at the Old Bailey (Penguin 2023) is a Sunday Times Bestseller.

Prof. Joan Kee, Dept. of History of Art, University of Michigan

Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan and currently a Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The author of numerous articles on contemporary art and law on topics such as artistic uses of police evidence, stalking and harassment, property laws and contemporary Chinese art, and artists’ rights. Her book Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America examines the relationship between contemporary art and the law through the lens of integrity, and how in the 1960s, artists began to engage conspicuously with legal ideas, rituals, and documents. She occasionally practices as a public interest lawyer in Detroit.

Prof. Des Manderson, Australian National University

Prof. Des Manderson is jointly appointed in the ANU Colleges of Law and of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He directs the Centre for Law, Arts and the Humanities, designing innovative interdisciplinary courses in collaboration with colleagues in English, philosophy, art theory and history, political theory, and beyond. His recent work pioneers the intersection of law and the visual arts, notably in Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies and Critique (2018); and Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (2019). His latest play, Twenty Minutes with the Devil (with Luis Gomez Romero) premiered at The Street Theatre, Canberra in June 2022.

Leslie Primo, independent art historian

Leslie Primo is an art historian, lecturer, author and broadcaster. He graduated from Birkbeck, University College, London with a BA in Art History and an Art History MA in Renaissance Studies. He specialises in early Medieval Art and Architecture, Italian Renaissance art, German art in the age of Reformation, Medici & Patronage, and mythology in the work of Peter Paul Rubens. Leslie worked as a lecturer at the National Gallery, London for 18 years, and in the same capacity at the National Portrait Gallery for 10 years. He has made a number of television and radio appearances, including the recent Art on the BBC series, speaking on the life of Michelangelo, and presenting a programme in the same series on JMW Turner. He was a guest panellist in Radio 4’s ‘Moving Pictures’ series. His literary work includes several contributions to the Oxford Companion Guide to Black British History (2007), an article for the Art UK website, ’Depicting the Magi: origins, gifts and representing men of colour’ (2018) and was the art history consultant for DK Life Stories: Leonardo da Vinci – a children’s book for ages 7-11 (2020). His new book The Foreigners that Invented British Art will be published by Thames & Hudson in 2024. He currently lectures for The Arts Society, and teaches a variety of art history courses at Imperial College London, the City Lit, London and The Course at the University Women’s Club, Mayfair.

Carey Young, artist
Carey Young uses video, photography, text, print, performance and installation to explore relations between the body, language, rhetoric, and systems of power. Since 2002, she created a series of works which address and explore law, and which have involved collaborations with lawyers. Young’s work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2020), La Loge, Brussels (2019), Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2019), Dallas Museum of Art (2017), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2013), The Power Plant, Toronto (2009), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2009 & tour) and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2001). Group shows include Centre Pompidou (Paris and Brussels), New Museum (New York), Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, ICA (London) and Secession (Vienna), amongst many others. She participated in numerous biennials, including Busan, Moscow, Taipei, Sharjah and Venice, and received a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2021.

Young’s works are held in major public collections including Tate, Arts Council Collection, Centre Pompidou, Sharjah Art Foundation and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst amongst others. Two monographs on her work have been published: Subject to Contract, (JRP|Ringier, 2013), and Carey Young: Incorporated, (Film and Video Umbrella and John Hansard Gallery, 2001). Her research fellowships include the Smithsonian, Washington DC; Wolfson College, University of Oxford; TORCH, University of Oxford; the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, and the Institut d’Études et de la Recherche sur le Droit et de la Justice, Paris. Young is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

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This event is supported by TORCH as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, in partnership with Modern Art Oxford. The event has been programmed by Carey Young and Amy Budd, curator, Modern Art Oxford, on the occasion of Carey Young: Appearance, Young’s solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, March 25th - July 2nd 2023. Young currently has a Humanities Cultural Programme Visiting Fellowship through 2023.