Littoral Law: The Cosmosis of Charles Gaines’s Manifestos 4 and Sky Box II (2020) with Sora han

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Sora Han (University of California, Irvine / Critical Race Theory and Visual Culture Fellow) examines the colonial law of the high seas and its various doctrines regulating everchanging natural borders between land and water to inform a reading of the break between the oceanic of law’s words and how contemporary artists rearticulate them into other aesthetic forms. The focus of her talk is Charles Gaines’s Manifestos 4 (2020) and Sky Box II (2020), which break the words of the infamous 1857 Supreme Court opinion, Dred Scott v. Sanford, with alternative rules-based processes of musical and sculptural composition. Breaking law conceptually offers a portal to a mystical realm of legal experience and interpretation beyond nomos into an arranging, translational field of black study.

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium.

Image: Charles Gaines, detail of Sky Box I, 2011.