Yazan Khalili & Jonas Staal

For their first collaborative exhibition, Yazan Khalili and Jonas Staal coined the term ‘state-traps.’ This term addresses more than a decade of artistic, legal and political tactical and strategic engagements through which both artists confront the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the nation-state. Positioning censorship as intrinsic to the freedom of speech, Staal and Khalili expose in their work the limits and falsity of a human right often perceived as the pillar of democracy.

Khalili and Staal suggest that when the law of the state opposes social justice, state-traps are creative, non-lethal assaults triggering the state to over-act. Through minimal means, artistic capabilities are able to elicit and provoke the nation-state to overreact as it is caught off-guard. These capabilities make visible the unjust over-powering of the nation-state, and thus, subversively are activating and challenging its institutions and legal systems.

The program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

Organized by The Agency for Legal Imagination operating throughout 2018 at MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38.