"Before the Look of Law" Symposium | Keynote by Judith Butler
"Before the Look of Law is a proposition based on several returns. The first is a return to Franz Kafka's parable, Before the Law (1915). There we encounter an image of a man waiting for permission to enter the Law, only to have the door shut on him in the final moments before death. He learns then that the door of Law was constructed not for everyone, as he had assumed, but solely for him. Law is an all-encompassing, isolating and unknowable framework of power to which our sense of the self and the social are tethered. At the same time, Law’s authority does not exist outside its arrangement of how and why it is given and with whom we come to gather before it.
The second is a return to The Look of Law, an exhibition organized by Simon Leung for the University Art Gallery in 2006. Responding to the "War on Terror" and wars waged by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, it charted the interstitial relationship between surveillance, the police, the prison, the military, the border; the erosion of the public sphere; the constant state of war; and the structural collusion between nationalism, corporate capitalism and mass media. From within these confluences, its artworks crystallized direct and residual effects of state power on the psyche.
The third is a return that layers the first two. It focuses on the intersection of Law and the psyche – the look of law – to ask a fundamental question embedded in Kafka’s parable: what does it mean to desire, to stand before, to be subject to, the power of Law? The difficulty of this question is compounded by unspeakably dire circumstances for society’s most vulnerable, including members of our campus. Ours is a time of a technologically accelerated hostile takeover of the collective psyche by a state/corporate/media collusion perpetuating unprecedented destruction of life and land, domestically and abroad.
The works presented in Before the Look of Law span those made in the early 1990’s to newly commissioned pieces. They reassemble the uncanny parts of real life that follow us into the place and time of waiting before the Law. They testify against militarized policing, mass imprisonment, global war-making, and the suppression of gender and sexual freedom. And they operate in double-time and longue durée to place an arrest on “the present.”
Their aesthetic strategies are far-ranging: from parrhesia to parody, speculative para-fiction to granular studies of materiality; from redistributing auras of the indexical to exploring the extra-legality of the readymade. They reflexively focus on the formation and mythification of Law’s capture of life as, among other dynamics, the work of artifice. Each possesses the ability of returning “the look of law” through dilating apertures in its gaze. Each holds urgent and abiding lessons about disobedience, aesthetic, political, and otherwise, at the edge of democracy and fascism."
Wednesday, December 2, 2026 - 9:00am to 6:30pm
Symposium
9:00 - 10:30am in HG 1030
Exhibition Walkthrough with Sora Han & Simon Leung
11 - 12:15am
Staged Reading of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return
Adapted and Directed by Jaye Austin Williams
Read by Malenia Friday, Christian Rabin, Jacob Reimer, Olamina Jiménez Sánchez, and more
2:00 - 4:45pm
Roundtable discussions with Swethaa Ballakrishnen, York Chang, Tarik Garrett, Sora Han, Annie Lai, Zoe Leonard, Simon Leung, Na Mira, Xyta Maya Murray, Tiffany Sia, Lincoln Tobier, Jaye Austin Williams, and more
5:00 - 6:30pm
Keynote lecture by Judith Butler, “Kafka Before the Law”
Before the Look of Law is jointly presented by the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts’ University Art Galleries (UAG) and Department of Art, and UCI Critical Theory.
Major support is provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Matt Bailey, the Claire Trevor Society, UCI Illuminations, and the UCI Poetic Justice Initiative.
Additional program support is provided by the Alec Glasser Center for the Power of Music and Social Change.
In partnership with UCI International Center for Writing and Translation, UCI Department of Asian American Studies, UCI Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, UCI Department of Art History, UCI Department of Film and Media Studies, UCI Department of History, UCI Center in Law, Society and Culture, UCI School of Humanities, UCI Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies, UCI Department of Criminology, Law & Society, and UCI Department of Comparative Literature.
