EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Jason File
Lunchtime Studio Visit with Jason File
As a lawyer and artist who embeds law in my art practice and art in my legal practice, I explore the poetics of juridical language and materials. In the art world, this takes the form of performances, videos, installations and objects. In the legal world, it is called testimony, evidence, contracts and administration. In both worlds it is an archive.
I make non-disclosure agreements with studio and gallery visitors to enable them to disclose a secret in confidence, investigating how NDAs may facilitate intimacy instead of silencing witnesses. As a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague, I tendered a postcard as evidence of the existence of a mosque that had been obliterated during an ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. As an artist, I returned it to its original status as a postcard, bearing the marks of its courtroom use, to be sold in a museum gift shop in London. As a United Nations lawyer, I had to shred classified military and intelligence documents that had been used as evidence once their purpose had been served. As an artist, I converted this real-life document destruction into a performance—and then turned the shreds back into paper again.
Re-contextualizing materials highlights the tension between the search for objective truth in the courtroom and the validation of subjective experience in the exhibition space. My work oscillates between these two objective/subjective poles, examining institutional contexts where artistic languages like writing, drawing and performing are expressed for alternate purposes, such as the exercise of political power.
