Law and Arts: Part 2 of 3

Curating Legal Storytelling

By Saskia Vermeylen - Posted on 10 August 2023

Legal Storytelling

As Toni Massari highlighted in his article, Empathy, legal storytelling, and the rule of law: new words, old wounds, legal storytelling has been gaining traction for several decades by those scholars who expand law beyond reasoning and logic. Critical legal scholars and feminist legal scholars, to name just a few, include legal narrative as important components of the legal methodology. Through my interest in legal pluralism in the context of post-colonial land reform in Southern Africa, storytelling has always been part of my methodological toolbox to learn from and engage with non-Eurocentric legal cultures. To deepen my understanding of the relationship between law and arts, I have turned again to storytelling as a method to chart the challenges of current space law and to re-imagine a more democratic and inclusive form of space law and governance. To expand on the performative elements of law in general and space law in particular, I have developed a curatorial practice that has allowed me to story the future of space law.

Law and Curating

Avi Feldman is one of the very few curators who has theorised about the relationship between law and curating (you can read more about this in the special issue on law and curating in the journal On Curating or Feldman’s PhD After the law: towards judicial-visual activism). His work has inspired the development of my own curatorial practice and I found the idea that curating can further legal theory and support legal activism to achieve justice particularly compelling. Through developing a curatorial practice and theory, art can act as a source of reflection and can give new legal meaning to certain phenomena. Curating and legal storytelling expand the horizon of existing artworks and their message may extend beyond the original intention of the artist. In other words, as a legal curator you are seeking to expose possible legal capabilities embedded in art that are not always immediately obvious to an audience or viewers.

In this blog post I share some of the insights I gained about legal curating when showing the exhibition EXTR-Activism at Kunsthalle Exnergasse at the Werkstatten und Kulturhaus in Vienna, and at Indecis Artist Run Space in Timișoara as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme.  

Exhibitions and storytelling

Philip Hughes’ book Storytelling Exhibitions has been a very valuable source to learn from how to curate an exhibition. Hughes’ prompts helped me to tell a powerful story about the past and future of space law by creating a dialogue between different artworks across time and space. My main role as the curator was to include perspectives from an art community that expands beyond those of a dominant cultural group. The narrative that I wanted to explore in my exhibition was: “What if the first human to step foot on the moon was a female Zambian ‘afronaut’? Would our attitudes to outer space, its exploration and exploitation be different?” Once I had settled on the main storyline, I had to think about other components that together make for an exhibition that has socio-legal and political resonance. These elements include amongst others:

  • Authorship of the artworks
  • The dialogue that emerges between the different artworks
  • The relationship between the artworks and the physical space of the gallery
  • The co-creation of new legal meanings that could be attributed to the art objects and soundscapes that were exhibited.

It is particularly the latter point that I unpick further hereafter.    

The exhibition EXTR-Activism

The official archive of space travel portrays history as a factual progression of known events, using the frontier as the main trope to justify the idea that space is empty. It is a myth that is used to justify the replication of settler colonial practices of homesteading, planting flags, mapping, and making roots. History may repeat itself on Mars unless we can halt it. The artworks selected for the exhibition EXTR-Activism question the techniques that have been used to colonise other people’s land and show that land is never terra nullius or empty.  Although we like to think that Mars is empty, we have already littered space with our debris, and may have already disturbed microorganisms. History is already repeating itself before the first Martians have left their footprint on the red surface.

Applying Mignolo’s idea of decoloniality to curating, the main idea of this exhibition is to (re)inscribe hidden and silenced voices and histories in space exploration, extractivism and space law. The exhibition challenges Eurocentric categories of aesthetics and retells the story of extractivism and space travel from the perspective of afronauts. The forgotten histories, contested legacies, and repressed memories of space travel are explored through a plethora of art practices that seek to blur the boundaries and distinctions between fiction and reality. 

Exhibition at a gallery with a pale badged bodysuit costume on the left and three patterned coloured sheets hanging on the right

© Wolfgang Thaler 2022

Exhibition view at the Werkstatten und Kulturhaus, Vienna

The main story

The “staging” of the exhibition has been inspired by the work of the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE. In Shonibare’s artwork (some examples of which can be viewed on his website), he questions U.S. exploration of the new frontier of space. While interrogating the history of space exploration and the Western desire to conquer new spaces, Shonibare raises the viability of an African Space Program. He does this by using Dutch wax printed cotton textile for his astronauts’ spacesuits. This conveys a double and ambiguous meaning. The wax prints were popular in the 1960s as a postcolonial celebration of African identity. However, while feted as a symbol of liberation, the patterned textile is in fact a batik fabric traditionally made in Indonesia, produced in the Netherlands, and sold in West Africa. For Shonibare, batik is a symbol of mercantile capitalism and the placelessness of a global commodity exchange. But batik also represents a specific critique against the propertisation of space resources.

While Shonibare admits that his afronauts embody a utopian element, he also argues that art can be transformative. Shonibare includes a vision of a world that someday may exist, giving his work an empowering quality that echoes a strong rejection of current legal discourses that promulgate lunar surfaces as white commercial spaces that can be propertised. Most of the artworks that I have selected or commissioned for EXTR-Activism build further upon this vision. Through developing a curatorial practice, I have been able to use a speculative methodology that has given new legal meaning to artworks that together re-imagine a fair and equitable use of space governed by more democratic and inclusive space law.