A double film screening and discussion event, looking at current developments and debates surrounding immigration law and citizenship. In the context of rapidly changing legal systems, EU-citizens' uncertainty over their rights after Brexit, the Catalonian independence referendum, the rise in xenophobic attacks and the resurgence of nationalism worldwide, the evening is a chance for an informal and open discussion about speculative legal frameworks and the possibilities of resistance.

The screenings will be followed by presentations and provocations from Dr. Miriam Cullen (Copenhagen University Centre for international law, Conflict and Crisis) and Søren Laursen (LGBT Danmark), and chaired by Jørgen Callesen (Founder and Artistic Director of Warehouse9).

Søren Laursen is a longtime activist and lobbyist with LGBT Denmark. Has worked extensively with family law, assisted reproduction, legal gender, trans depathologisation, access to health services and asylum. Is former member of the refugee appeals board.

Dr. Miriam Cullen is Assistant Professor of Climate and Migration Law at Copenhagen University. Her current research is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark and interrogates mobility rights in an age of climate change. She was previously part of the Australian Research Council funded project ‘Australia’s Response to Trafficking in Women: Towards a Model for the Regulation of Forced Migration in the Asia-Pacific Region’. Miriam has represented the Australian Government on the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly, having independently negotiated a range of human rights resolutions, including those on the rights of migrants, trafficking in woman and girls, social development, and extreme poverty. She has been a consultant to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and managed public inquiries for the Legislative Council of the New South Wales Parliament, and the Victorian Law Reform Commission. Miriam has also held positions in the International Legal Division, and the International Security Division of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Alicja Rogalska (PL/UK): WHAT IF AS IF
Legal fictions are devices used in legal reasoning when something not true is believed or assumed to be true; they allow for the law to be applied without changing the text of the law. An example of a legal fiction is when an inheritor refuses to accept an inheritance - in order for this to be legally possible they need to be declared dead by the court and having died before the person who left the legacy. What if As If explores legal fictions in international immigration law in collaboration with refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants based in the UK who trained as lawyers in their countries of origin. The video was filmed in a former courtroom and greenscreen, a device for filmic fiction, is used throughout. Commissioned for Dreams and Dramas - Law as Literature exhibition at NGBK, Berlin and developed with support from the Artsadmin Artists’ Bursary Scheme.

Núria Güell (ES): STATELESS BY CHOICE
Nationality is conceived as the quality that infuses in a person the fact of belonging to a national community organized as a state. This project is born from Güell’s dis-identification with the nation-state structure and her rejection of nationality as an imposed identity construction.

Through several Spanish governmental institutions Güell applied to give up her nationality and acquire the status of stateless person but the request was denied without any meaningful reason. In response to this negative, she hired a lawyer to work on a study about the Spanish legislation that revealed it is only possible to lose Spanish citizenship as a punishment from the state, not as a personal choice in which you can quit it.

Güell's Stateless by Choice documents her attempt to acquire the status of a stateless person, discussing current European legal frameworks and their methods of control.

ABOUT ALICJA ROGALSKA:

Alicja Rogalska is a visual artist living in London and Warsaw and working internationally. Her practice is interdisciplinary, collaborative and focuses on social structures and the political subtext of the everyday. She mostly works in specific contexts creating situations and performances, which then become the material for videos and installations. These events are attempts to practise a different political reality here and now, create space for many voices to be heard and to co-exist, whilst collectively searching for emancipatory ideas for the future.

alicjarogalska.com

ABOUT NÚRIA GÜELL:

Núria Güell's artistic practice is about the analysis of how power devices affect our subjectivity, subjecting it to law and hegemonic moral.

The main resources that she uses in her work are to flirt with the established powers, complicity with different allies and the uses of privileges that artistic institutions she works with have, as well as those socially granted to her for being a Spanish and European. These tactics, diluted into her own life, are developed in specific contexts intending to question commonly-assumed identifications and cause a disruption in power relations.

nuriaguell.net

THIS EVENT IS PART OF BODIES BEYOND BORDERS: TERRITORY 2017
A PROJECT BY OSBORN&MØLLER
OSBORNMOLLER.ORG