The Law is a White Dog
Curated by Sarah Browne
6 November - 18 December 2020
Galway, Ireland
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts is delighted to share the public outcomes and online documentation of its 2020 programme, The Law is a White Dog, including a podcast series, a book, exhibition, and a series of online talks and workshops. Contributors (artists, poets, lawyers, activists): AM Baggs, Éric Baudelaire, Rossella Biscotti, Caroline Campbell (Loitering Theatre), Maud Craigie, Máiréad Enright, Forerunner, Michael Holly, Justice for Magdalenes Research, Vukašin Nedeljković, Felispeaks, Charlotte Prodger, Bob Quinn, Sibyl Montague, Kevin Mooney, Julie Morrissy, Rory Pilgrim, Rajinder Singh, Soft Fiction Projects, Anne Tallentire, Saoirse Wall, Eimear Walshe, Suzanne Walsh, Gernot Wieland.
The Law is a White Dog borrowed its title from a book by Colin Dayan, which explores how legal rituals have the power to "make and unmake" persons. Historically, certain categories of person have been invented mainly in order to confine or punish them—the slave, the criminal, the homosexual, the insane—and these categories are further entangled and haunted by classifications based on race. Conceived in the legal imagination in this way, these different classes of person are allocated unequal capacities for reason and for pain, and are distributed different rights to property—whether rights to own one’s own body, or to acquire land. In a west of Ireland context, Dayan’s text offers new ways to recognise persistent legal spectres and zones of exception in the landscape, and to consider the interaction of capital with the institutions of Church and State.
As a curatorial proposal, The Law is a White Dog invited artists to refute categorisation, and to invent new languages and forms of expression in order to develop affinities with others. Responses involve forms of memoir, analysis, mourning, fable, film and song. Again and again, an obstacle occurs: the problem of how sensing bodies, as sources of knowledge, conflict with legal and regulatory logics. How do we know the law, and how does the law know us?
