Before the Look of Law examines how contemporary artists confront justice, state power, and collective resistance through practices of aesthetic disobedience. Taking its title from Franz Kafka's short story Before the Law, the exhibition begins with the image of a man waiting for permission to enter the Law, only to remain forever outside its gates. Kafka's parable poses a question that remains urgent today: who is the imagined "everyone" who believes justice is available to all, and why does no one arrive to seek it together?

Rather than treating the Law as a fixed institution, the exhibition understands justice as something collectively imagined and continually pursued. Kafka's "before" becomes not simply a moment of waiting, but an opening toward shared responsibility—a space where the possibility of justice depends upon collective action rather than individual admission.

The exhibition and its accompanying public programs seek to give form to this collective "everyone." At a moment marked by profound political and social precarity, Before the Look of Law considers how artists create images and languages of recognition, solidarity, and resistance. Through works addressing war, policing and imprisonment, genocide and ethnic cleansing, attacks on immigrant communities, and the repression of gender and sexual freedom, the exhibition traces a legacy of what Ariella Azoulay has called "visual disobedience" and, more broadly, what Jason Neufeld describes as "aesthetic disobedience."

Before the Look of Law revisits The Look of Law, the 2006 exhibition organized by Simon Leung at the University Art Gallery. Organized during the height of the United States' "War on Terror" and military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the earlier exhibition examined the relationship between state power and the psyche. Twenty years later, this project returns to those questions while shifting its focus toward collective forms of resistance and political imagination. The conference accompanying the original exhibition was later published by the College Art Association in Art Journal, and Leung's introductory essay received the journal's award for the year's most distinguished contribution.

Exhibiting Artists: Cameron Rowland, Tarik Garrett, York Chang, Ashley Hunt, Lincoln Tobier, Tiffany Sia, Samar Al Summary, Zoe Leonard, Paul McCarthy, Kiyan Williams, Na Mira, Sheila Pinkel, Alberto Lule, and Kim Zumpfe & Luke Quezada.

More information on the parallel program will be shared soon. 

Before the Look of Law is made possible through the generous support of the Poetic Justice Initiative and the Claire Trevor Society.