Start event: Terms and Conditions: April 10 & 11, 2024, Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB)

In the coming two years, the Harun Farocki Institut will dedicate a large part of its programming to its new research artistic project “Terms and Conditions. The Legal Form of Images.” Developed together with artists, filmmakers, art historians, legal scholars, and media theorists and in collaboration with various presentation venues in Berlin, Leipzig, Zürich and Locarno, Terms and Conditions will inquire into the largely overlooked (or willfully ignored) legal and paralegal frameworks which increasingly inform the contemporary art and visual culture.

On Wednesday, April 10 and Thursday, April 11, we will launch Terms and Conditions with a two day event organized with, and presented at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB), our project partner. Conceived as a public seminar, there will be conversations and exchanges with the legal scholars Daria Bayer, Gwinyai Machona and others, as well as a presentation by the artist duo titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster/Marcel Dickhage) in conversation with the researcher, curator and artistic director of Savvy Contemporary Art Renan Laru-an.

The event will also mark the start of several Case Studies to be developed with the students from the departments of Media Art / Expanded Cinema (Clemens von Wedemeyer / Mareike Bernien) and of Photography / Photography and Media (Ines Schaber / Susanne Keichel) respectively in the HGB gallery (directed by Ilse Lafer).

With Terms and Conditions we will expand our online publication Rosa Mercedes with a new special issue dedicated exclusively to the project. In it, we aim to publish (or republish) important historical and contemporary texts (also: visual essays, videos and podcasts) relevant to our current and forthcoming research and its associated presentations. Additionally, we will be creating a glossary of terms key terms at the intersections of law and image. On April 10, we will launch Rosa Mercedes 08: Terms and Conditions with the publication of our editorial.

Terms and Conditions: The Legal Form of Images

Public Seminar
Wed. April 10, 2024, 3.30 p.m. – 7p.m.
With an introduction by Tom Holert (Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin) and Doreen Mende (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and HaFI) and comments by the legal scholars Gwinyai Machona and Daria Bayer as well as Mareike Bernien, Ilse Lafer, Ines Schaber, Clemens von Wedemeyer (all HGB). Event in German.
Thu. April 11, 2024, 10h – 13h
With artist duo titre provisoire (Cathleen Schuster/Marcel Dickhage) in conversation with Renan Laru-an (researcher, curator and artistic director of Savvy Contemporary Art). Event in English

“Performing a Case Study”
Duration: 10.4. – 10.5.2024
With the participation of the classes Expanded Cinema (Clemens von Wedemeyer / Mareike Bernien) and Photography and Media (Ines Schaber / Susanne Keichel)

Location: HGB Galerie. Free entry
A cooperation project between the Harun Farocki Institut and the HGB Leipzig.

Increasingly, contemporary image culture is informed by legal and para-legal frameworks. From state legislations to corporate regulations, from intellectual property and copyright to privacy issues, the operations of the law or law-like agencies permeate the fields of art and visual culture.

Long disavowed by cultural producers and their audiences alike, attention to these very frameworks is currently on the rise among practitioners. Terms and Conditions. The Legal Form of Images sets out to engage with this new work by artists, filmmakers, and scholars at the intersections of the audiovisual and the law, both locally and globally. A principal aim of the collaborative project is to foster general legal literacy in the realm of contemporary image culture—an ability to comprehend the juridical matrix in which images (here understood in a broad sense, i.e. exceeding visual representations) are embedded.

The range of topics comprised by Terms and Conditions pertains to the infrastructures and mechanisms governing the visibility (and invisibility) of images in the face of the law, the utilization of audiovisual media in law enforcement, court proceedings, and other legal contexts, the impact of technological developments (digitization, AI) on the language of visual forms, and the legacy of colonial laws as well as the challenge of decolonial legal concepts.

The diverse intersections of law and image ask for a multidisciplinary understanding, and demand the emergence of new actors capable of both enforcing and critically assessing these legal structures. At the core of this constellation of issues sits the tension between social struggles and the law, which has intensified alongside the crisis of the regime of truth that structured Western ideas of enlightenment, liberalism and democracy.

Terms and Conditions will be developed together with artists, filmmakers, art historians, legal scholars, and media theorists in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB), departments of film and media studies (EMW, Potsdam; UZH, Zurich), the Berlin Artistic Research Programme (BFKF, Berlin), Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin and the Locarno Film Festival.