Professor Carey Young

Email: carey.young@ucl.ac.uk

Bio:

Professor Carey Young is Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, and an internationally recognised visual artist whose work has, for over twenty-five years, critically examined the structures, aesthetics and imaginaries of law. Working across video, photography, performance, text and installation, her practice explores how legal frameworks shape subjectivity, gender and power, and how authority is performed, embodied and visualised. Young has collaborated extensively with lawyers and legal theorists to create bespoke legal instruments as artworks, engaging fields including intellectual property, contracts, land law, outer space law and human rights. Her work has been exhibited widely at major museums including Tate Britain, the Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, the Power Plant (Toronto), Jeu de Paume (Paris), Secession (Vienna), the New Museum (New York) and MoMA PS1 (New York), and is held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, Tate and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others. She received a Paul Hamlyn Award in 2021 and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2022, and is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Law, Birkbeck. www.careyyoung.com

Representative publications: 

• Appearance (2023), HD video, 49 mins 30 secs. A large‑scale, silent video portrait of fifteen UK female judges examining how authority, judgement and legal culture are performed through the body, the gaze and judicial regalia. By positioning the viewer “in the dock”, the work interrogates the power relations between judge and camera while challenging patriarchal traditions of the law. Premiered in Carey Young: Appearance, Modern Art Oxford (March–July 2023); subsequently exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (Jan–Feb 2024).
• Palais de Justice (2017), HD video, 17 mins 58 secs. Filmed surreptitiously in Belgium’s main courthouse, this film observes female judges and lawyers at work, offering a rare, intimate view of legal performance and institutional choreography. A speculative fiction, the piece wordlessly evokes a post-patriarchal legal system in which only women occupy all judicial roles, while considering  the tensions between transparency, spectatorship and the architectures of justice.
• Declared Void (2005), text-based installation. A site‑specific legal instrument drafted in collaboration with a constitutional lawyer, declaring a designated area in an art gallery to be “void” of certain legal rights. The work examines the fragility of constitutional protections, the performativity of law and the ways legal language can both construct and suspend subjecthood.