SENSE STRANDS:
The FIVE LEAF exhibition on law and aesthetics.
On the occasion of the FIVE LEAF inaugural conference, 1-2 June 2026.
Curated by Johanna Gibson
Aesthetics encompass the very experience and interpretation of our legal and social lives. Art and aesthetic theory have for centuries been engaged in collision and conflict on the questions of how we make sense. But what of the law as the context for how we experience that sense? What of the law as itself a subject of aesthetic enquiry? This exhibition brings together strands of aesthetic interventions into questions of policy and ethics, fragmenting the contrived singularity of the law, and challenging the rationality of the law’s intention as possessive of instrumental reason. In doing so, the works take an aesthetic lens to law and legal institutions, inviting the viewer to complete the picture in examining the law itself as an aesthetic object.
(Johanna Gibson, May 2026).