The Law is a White Dog

Contributors are artists, poets, lawyers and activists: AM Baggs, Éric Baudelaire, Rossella Biscotti, Caroline Campbell (Loitering Theatre), Maud Craigie, Máiréad Enright, Forerunner (Tanad Williams & Andreas Kindler von Knobloch), 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 and Gernot Wieland

Curated by Sarah Browne

The Law is a White Dog borrows 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. Where Dayan’s book explores the interaction of personhood and dispossession within the USA, its themes find particular resonance in Connacht, the western-most province of Ireland: this region was the alternative to hell offered by Cromwell during the time of the Penal Laws and the mass evictions of the Plantation era. The Law is a White Dog offers new ways to recognise and consider persistent legal spectres and zones of exception in the landscape, such as the asylum-seekers detained in Direct Provision Centres who are awaiting a ruling, and those who survived (or tragically died) inside state-approved religious institutions, such as the Mother and Baby Home at Tuam, or the industrial school at Letterfrack.

Certain kinds of legal speech (judgements, in particular) force new realities into being, when they are declared by the powerful: “I find you guilty”; ‘”I pronounce you married”; “I sentence you to X.” With this transformative potential in mind, artists have been invited to consider their work as forms of address that could relate to processes such as bearing witness, giving testimony, granting pardon, lodging complaint, forming contracts, presenting evidence—or steadfastly refusing to speak in those terms. The Law is a White Dog invites artists to refute categorisation, to invent new languages and forms of expression, and to develop new affinities with others. Artworks presented involve forms of memoir, analysis, mourning, fable, film and song. Again and again, an obstacle occurs for the artists assembled here: the problem of how bodies, as sources of knowledge, come into conflict with legal and regulatory logics. How do we know the law, and how does the law know us? Often the body is a source of knowledge whose senses and desires expand beyond what the law deems legible or can claim to govern, like a trespassing bee in search of nectar.

Unfolding in the time of a historical global pandemic, where movement is restricted, TULCA in 2020 is publishing a limited-edition book and a podcast series in addition to an exhibition of artworks and other artefacts. The book and the podcast both feature a wide range of newly commissioned writing, original research and artworks, accessible in multiple forms to audiences beyond Galway. Additionally, artists are placed in dialogue with legal researchers and practitioners from the Irish Centre for Human Rights and the Centre for Disability Law and Policy, both located at the National University of Ireland, Galway, including Dr. Maeve O’Rourke, Prof. Eilionóir Flynn and Maria Ní Fhlatharta.

Exhibition venues: An Post Festival Gallery, Galway Arts Centre, 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Engage Studios, Galway City Museum and PÁLÁS Cinema, pending government restrictions and public health advice. Selected artist projects will also be presented online and as a public billboard in the city. The Law is a White Dog book is available to order through Kenny’s Bookshop.

For further information and press enquiries please contact: info [​at​] tulca.ie