by Alison Hugill // May 9, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Legality.
The term “extralegality” gets at something beyond the legal-illegal binary: it suggests a work-around that questions the sharply, yet arbitrarily, delineated moral boundaries of the law. In the US right now, the topic of “undocumented immigrants” (or “illegal aliens” as the Trump administration has labelled them) has taken a central position in policy, leading to mass deportations and the establishment of heinous incarceration facilities, like CECOT, the so-called “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador. Human rights laws are being eroded across the world, from Palestine to Sudan, and it becomes increasingly clear that these laws are not universally applicable, as we might have once believed. There is a certain violence at the heart of every legal institution, to the extent that legal systems are most often designed to protect the ruling class, as Walter Benjamin clearly illustrated more than 100-years ago in his essay ‘The Critique of Violence.’
With this featured topic, we look at artists whose practices critically consider the law and its fallibility. The topic was devised alongside the announcement of this year’s Berlin Biennale theme, which has been articulated as “a working concept of fugitivity understood as the cultural ability of a work of art to set its own laws, in the face of lawful violence.” In a featured interview with Biennale curator Zasha Colah, we discuss the theme of “foxing” (a notion of traversing laws that are in themselves unjust) and how it has permeated the Biennale, from the graphic design to the choice of venues.
Former Courthouse Lehrter Straße, 2025 // Photo by Raisa Galofre
In another contribution, William Kherbek speaks to American artist Sable Elyse Smith, whose interdisciplinary works connect language and violence, through a particular consideration of incarceration and its consequences in the US context. As Kherbek writes, Smith’s work considers “a media sphere dominated by everything from sensationalized manhunts to prison furniture designed to enforce and reify a vulgar order of violence.” Smith’s works explore “the uneven terrain of hypervisibility and enforced disappearance that these dynamics create.”
Sable Elyse Smith: ‘Landscape V,’ 2020, neon, 94 x 452.1 cm // © Sable Elyse Smith, courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Carlos/Ishikawa, London
Meanwhile, Johanna Siegler will interview Berlin-based artist Sung Tieu, whose exhibition ‘1992, 2025’ recently took place at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. In this piece, they discuss the ways in which the archival experience, as well as legal and bureaucratic documentation, leave an imprint on the display and choreographing of Tieu’s work.
In another piece, Jayne Wilkinson considers Gala Porras-Kim’s recently launched “exhibition-in-print,” published as part of the inaugural issue of Pina magazine. The 60-page long exhibition, as Wilkinson explains, “presents the legal case for defending the rights of Nenkheftka, an ancient Egyptian official who is depicted in a statue that has been on display in the British Museum since the late 1800s. The work imagines and then constructs a legal framework for defining personhood through an object; in this case, the sculpture, since it was meant to contain and house the person’s spirit in the afterlife, for eternity.”
Pina Issue 1: Gala Porras-Kim // Courtesy of Pina
Dagmara Genda will also speak with artist and researcher Susan Schuppli, whose work examines material evidence, from war and conflict to environmental disasters and climate change. Schuppli has recently been researching the role of ice as a legal witness within the rubric of climate change. Her work ‘cold cases’ (2021-22) investigates “the politics of ‘cold’ through the examination of a series of cases and contexts in which the thermostatic condition of cold and its differential experiences and effects are entangled with legal questions, human rights violations, but also claims for social and environmental justice.”
Approaching questions of legality from carceral capitalism to climate justice, this featured topic aims to critically reflect on the ways in which laws are often arbitrarily and violently defined, and challenge the idea that they apply to everyone in the same way.
