Wissensketten #2: On Trials: a manual for the theatre of law

With Başak Ertür, Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk

On Trials is an ongoing research project of Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk in which they explore the performativity of the law within Egypt’s spectral legal reality. For Wissensketten #2 the artists invite scholarBaşak Ertür for an exchange about their respective, recently published books:On Trials: a manual for the theatre of law (Archive Books, 2021) dissects the material that Metwaly and Rizk collected for their work-in-progress film On Trials, while Ertür’s book Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials(Fordham University Press, 2022) draws on theories of performativity to conceptualize the entanglements of law and political violence.One aspect that overlaps in their work is what Ertür has described as “the inadvertent, the ghostly, and the speculative [that] come to inhabit legal form.” Alongside various film excerpts and materials from On Trials, the discussion will touch on the authority of the law and its relationship to the image, and explore modes of re-enactment and enactment in filmic performance. The authors would like to invite the audience into a conversation with open threads and unfinished theses. 

Jasmina Metwaly is an artist and filmmaker based in Cairo and Berlin, and a member of Mosireen collective and media archive 858.ma. Rooted in performance and theatre, she works in video and film, and has recently started drawing again. Metwaly is a former fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme. 

Philip Rizk is a film-maker & artist from Cairo living in Berlin. In his films he experiments with methods of performance, found footage and montage, “making the habitual strange.” A question that runs throughout Rizk’s projects is, “how do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?” He is a fellow at the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme. 

Başak Ertür teaches law, co-directs the Centre for Law and the Humanities at Birkbeck School of Law. and is a research fellow at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first book Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials (2022) is concerned with questions of legal violence, and the epistemologies and aesthetics of law.