Contemporary Art in the United Kingdom is a diverse, in-depth exploration of those at the cutting edge of British Art, providing a unique complexion of the contemporary art scene in the British Isles. Including work by artists including Gillian Wearing, Steve McQueen, Fiona Banner, Bob and Roberta Smith, Chris Ofili, Douglas Gordon, Sarah Lucas, Liam Gillick, Tacita Dean, Paul Noble, Carey Young.

In this video we see an actor dressed as a lawyer, standing in a vast white space. He interprets a script composed of legal terms from a commercial contract. The details of the contract have been omitted, leaving a list of words such as ‘contract’, ‘parties’, ‘tender’ and ‘service’. The actor delivers the words one by one, starting ‘in character’ as a lawyer, before creating multiple interpretations through gesture, style and characterisation. The piece questions whether the lawyer’s legal identity, and that of the law itself, can be seen as a mere surface to be changed or dissolved at will. The performativity inherent to the courtroom is used as a way to question the assumed objectivity of the law, with the actor’s multiple interpretations instead suggesting an inherent subjectivity. The piece, which inhabits the form of a contract, explores law as a conceptual space, with the actor’s moving body suggesting a typographic form against the abstract whiteness of the backdrop. Solo exhibitions of this work include Migros Museum (Zurich 2013), Paula Cooper Gallery (New York, 2010), The Power Plant (Toronto, 2009), Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, 2009), and Eastside Projects (Birmingham 2010 and tour to Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesbrough.) Group exhibitions include World as Stage, nbk, Berlin, 2009 (exh. cat). The piece was featured three times in Artforum, reviewed in Art Monthly and Frieze (online); discussed in publications Carey Young, monograph, pub. Migros Museum/JRP Ringier (2013), Permanent Mimesis, exh. cat., pub. Electa Mondadori/GAM, Turin, 2010, and The World as Stage, Neue Berliner Kunstverein / Walter Konig. 2010; discussed in artist talks at venues including Centre Pompidou and the Miami Art Museum and within leading conferences at Tate Modern, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

The interactive telephone piece Follow the Protest uses a call centre interface to offer recordings of interviews and other sounds recorded by the artist at the G20 protests in London in April 2009. A key concern of the work is the desire for a pro-revolutionary Leftist stance within the artistic sphere, and the artistic avant garde, with its historical connection to ideas of revolution. The work offers a playful ‘protest on demand’; the piece contrasts the architecture and aural experience of today’s typical ‘commercial’ phone call with the sound, passion and ‘liveness’ of direct action protest. The recordings include various protest chants, speeches and interviews with a variety of protestors, including a TV journalist, a protest organiser and employees of an investment bank. The piece contrasts physical gallery space with a telephonic, hypertextual labyrinth to be explored and interacted with by the viewer, like a negative space or ‘non-site’ which reflects and inverts the exhibition site. Nevertheless, the work subtly alludes to the increasing commercialisation, if not corporatisation of the art world, and the bureaucratic functions inherent to any art institution. Solo exhibitions include Eastside Projects (Birmingham, 2010 and tour to Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesbrough); Contemporary Art Museum Saint Louis, Saint Louis. Group exhibitions include “Commentary”, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY, 2009. Conferences and public lectures “Politics and Photography - Carey Young & Immo Klink,” Photoworks, Brighton, 2011 “Art Speech: A Symposium on Symposia,” MoMA, New York, NY, 2011, “Vidéo et après,” Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2010. Publications include Carey Young, monograph, pub. Migros Museum/JRP Ringier (2013); Bryan- Wilson, Julia. “Inside Job: Julia Bryan-Wilson on the art of Carey Young,” Artforum October 2010, pp. 240-247; Katz, Miriam. “Carey Young: 500 Words,” Artforum (online) May 5, 2009.

Speechcraft features a meeting of the international public speaking club Toastmasters, presented as a participatory performance that the artist has adapted by inserting her own subject matter. It was staged at the Hayward Gallery, London on June 23rd 2012, as well as prior stagings by The Power Plant, Toronto (2009), Creative Time, New York (2008) and Modern Art Oxford (2007).

Museum 21: Institution Idea Practice was an international symposium at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin, which investigated new perspectives on the role and function of public galleries and museums in the 21st century by exploring their key challenges, frictions and possibilities. Speakers: Bart De Baere, Okwui Enwezor, Andrea Fraser, Enrique Juncosa, Susan Pearce, Carey Young

Counter Offer (2008) is a two-part text piece created with the advice of a legal team. The first part contains an offer (of ‘liberty’) and the second a counter offer (of ‘justice’). Through the wording of the contract, these utopian offers are surrounded by a legal loop in which both are cancelled out in ‘mid air’: through the act of reading, both offers become withdrawn, and the piece seems to suggests its own erasure. The work asks: how might law be used as an artistic medium? Can an artwork also be a functional legal contract? How might a moment of poetry be created within a contractual structure? The work was commissioned by Electra and Thomas Dane Gallery in 2008. Solo exhibitions featuring this work include Migros Museum (Zurich 2013), The Power Plant (Toronto, 2009), Eastside Projects (Birmingham 2010 and tour to Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesbrough), Thomas Dane Gallery, 2008. Group exhibitions include Museum as Hub: The Accords, The New Museum, New York, NY. 2011, Permanent Mimesis, curated by Alessandro Rabottini, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy, 2010. Group show including Roman Ondák, Seth Price. It was reviewed in Frieze (online, 2009); featured in publications Migros Museum (Zurich 2013), Permanent Mimesis, exhibition catalogue, pub. Electa Mondadori/GAM, Turin, 2010, and Art and Text, Black Dog Publishing, London, UK, 2009; discussed in artist talks at venues including Photoworks, Brighton, Centre Pompidou and the Miami Art Museum and within leading conferences at Tate Modern, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, University of Sussex and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

This half-day symposium invited audience members to engage with international artists and academics to investigate current conditions of artistic production in relation to new forms of labour in the emerging global economy. Speakers included Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Pascal Gielen, Stefano Harney, Stewart Martin, Hito Steyerl, and Carey Young. The event was chaired by T.J. Demos and Lauren Rotenberg.

Obsidian Contract features a legal contract written backwards and reflected in a black mirror. Dark or obsidian mirrors have a long tradition within witchcraft and the occul. Associated with attempts to see or ‘divine’ the future or to communicate with ‘spirit worlds’, they also became an artistic device used by landscape painters in the Romantic era. The text in this piece proposes the exhibition space visible in the black mirror as a new area of publicly-owned land, in which numerous activities which states have made illegal in public space, such as the grazing of animals, sexual activity or the distribution of propaganda, are made permissible. This piece is intended to question the privatisation and commodification of the commons by proposing a new area of the commons within the exhibition space. Although this space is virtual and unfixed (it extends according to the viewer’s angle of vision, and is potentially infinite, according to the exhibition space), the legal agreement the gallery signs up to is real and potentially ‘actionable’ in law. The piece exists as an liberatory and experimental legal instrument that uses law as an artistic medium. It suggests law as a separate kind of ‘reality’, one with its own inherent subjectivities and points of fissure. Solo exhibitions of this work include Migros Museum (Zurich 2013), Eastside Projects (Birmingham 2010 and tour to Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesbrough), Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2010. Group exhibitions include ‘Mind the System, Find the Gap’, Z33, Hasselt, Belgium, 2012 (exh. cat); ‘Museum as Hub: The Accords’, The New Museum, New York, NY. 2011. ‘Ventajas de viajar en tren’, Parra & Romero, Madrid, 2011; Void if Removed, Le Plateau / Frac Île-de-France, Paris, France, 2011. The piece was reviewed in Art Monthly and included in Carey Young, monograph, pub. Migros Museum/JRP Ringier (2013).

This study day explored different ideas of avant-garde art in the early twentieth century, and in contemporary practice and was staged in relation to the major Tate Modern exhibition Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia. Speakers included Paul Wood, TJ Demos, Jason Gaiger, Jennifer Mundy, Dave Beech, Carey Young and Richard De Domenici.

A series of six ‘camera-less’ photographs made by exposing light through translucent meteorite fragments in the darkroom, as if they were photographic negatives. The resulting images are abstract yet offer us a window into a meteorite’s formation at the birth of the solar system some 4.75 billion years ago, long before the formation of the Earth. Whilst the image relates cosmic time to the indexical moment of exposure embedded in any photograph, the title includes a copyright statement outlining an comet-like scattering of the image into the public domain after the artist’s death. Created with a specialist IP lawyer, this represents an experimental new form in copyright law. The title of each work in the series is: ‘C-type print from the Redshift series (exposed from a slice of pallasite meteorite, formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago, at the birth of the Solar System. The artist hereby declares that with effect from 1st January 2110 copyright protection in this work shall be abandoned on a country by country basis. This global abandonment of copyright is to begin with the Prime Meridian and will proceed westerly across the globe at the rate of 1000 miles per year, as measured from the Equator).’ Solo exhibitions of this project include Le Quartier, (Quimper, 2013), Migros Museum (Zurich, 2013), Eastside Projects (Birmingham, 2010 and tour to Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesbrough); Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2010. Group exhibitions include ‘Space. About a Dream’, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2011 (exh. cat); ‘Sophie Calle, Christian Marclay, Paul Pfeiffer, Walid Raad, Michael Sailstorfer, Carey Young’, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, 2011. Conferences and public lectures include Photoworks, Brighton, 2011. Publications include Carey Young, monograph, pub. Migros Museum/JRP Ringier (2013); Adler, Phoebe and Slyce, John, Contemporary Art in the UK, Black Dog Publishing, 2012.

'Missing Mass' is a sculptural work created with the scientific advice of Dr. Malcolm Fairbairn, an astrophysicist based at King’s College London. The piece ‘presents’ a specific number of dark matter particles, calculated to be present according to scientific logic, alongside a legal disclaimer which proposes the particles as the only truly free entities in existence, since they can pass through any material entity on the planet. The work centres on the idea of artistic freedom, suggesting that if dark matter particles are the only free entities in existence, by implication, art, the artist, and any other societal or cultural element held to be symbolic of freedom, are merely constrained, whether by gravity, bureaucracy, institutional ties, etc. The work also proposes links between minimal and conceptual sculpture (such as the early work of Hans Haacke) and contemporary developments in astrophysics. Like a number of my works, the piece uses a legal disclaimer, a written form familiar from contemporary communications, which symbolises the lack of responsibility taken by large organisations in the contemporary era. Solo exhibitions include Le Quartier, (Quimper, 2013), Migros Museum (Zurich, 2013), mima, Middlesbrough (2010), Paula Cooper Gallery (New York, 2010). Group exhibitions include Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York, 2012). Publications include Williams, Tom. “Carey Young” Art in America January 2011, pg. 110-111; illus.