Model Court is an ongoing curatorial/research project that was designed by the artists Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Lawrence Abu Hamdan and which also involves Lorenzo Pezzani and Oliver Rees. It uses the structure and technologies of the courtroom to interrogate the signifying and controlling role architecture plays in contemporary art and society.
The project began as an exhibition and accompanying publication commissioned by the Centre of Contemporary Art in Glasgow. The point of departure for this project was the work of Architect Hikaru Kitai, who is working on a World Bank sponsored commission to design courtrooms in the “developing world”. Kitai’s project occupies the ambivalent ground between a search for innovative forms of transparency and imposed forms of justice. Through conversations with Kitai the Gallery in Glasgow was redesigned as a model of a courtroom. In this first incarnation of ‘Model Court’ the legal technologies of representation and the protocol of spatial/legal practice were used to display a series of video, sound, written works and talks both by the artists and other practitioners.
In conjunction with the Model Court residency at Ptarmigan, the Model Court artists (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lorenzo Pezzani and Oliver Rees) will be presenting a Clip Kino night exploring the intersection of the courtroom and the cinema.
For more information see Ptarmigan artists-in-residence page
This event was supported by a multi-cultural grant from Arts Council Finland.
Ilmainen pääsy / free entry
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EVENT SELECTIONS [title, min:sec / link / uploader, date of upload]
Please note: The following clips give an indication of the materials Model Court used to encourage discussion in this event, and were not the actual clips shown.
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Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) [excerpt] [3:45]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHLtTRvdZrk
prolifedave — December 01, 2006
The Specialist [0:39]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2TqKKBzsMc
AmythosFilms — May 08, 2008
http://www.cinemagora.co.uk/movie-6782-the-specialist.html
Eichmann trial news story [1:14]
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Eichmann_trial_news_story.ogg
Model Court group also showed the artist's own video-footage from within the Provoo court case of a Rwandan living in Finland on trial for genocide.
'Rwanda Genocide Trial in Porvoo Nearing End', YLE.fi. 16.4.2010
Pastor to go on trial for Rwanda genocide - 01 Sep 09 [2:31]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k4p7UAs3z8
AlJazeeraEnglish — August 31, 2009
For more understanding about Courts and trials in Cinema:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_movies
'Law, cinema, and ideology: Hollywood legal films of the 1950s' article by David Ray Papke.
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