Lita's House – Gallows IV by Sofia Karim
ICA Research Collective in Residence 2026–27
Visible Justice is the 2026–27 Research Collective in Residence at the ICA. Rethinking the legal concept of habeas corpus through the visual arts, Visible Justice’s year-long residency will consider the body as a site of both injury and resistance. Through a series of talks, performances, workshops, and screenings, they will reflect on the multivalent meanings and resonances of this demand to ‘produce the body’. The programme will explore different sites and conceptions of justice, engaging in urgent discussions around censorship, proscription, abolition, occupation, displacement, and gendered violence. Bringing together artists, academics, writers, and performers, the curated programme will ask what it means to bear witness, how we might imagine more embodied forms of justice, and for whom the body is ‘produced’.
"Justice is what love looks like in public." – Dr. Cornel West
The residency will focus on how justice is experienced by individuals and communities excluded from orthodox legal systems. It will consider where sites of resistance reside – not only within political and legislative frameworks, but also in everyday acts of refusal, and in bodily experience.
Across the programme, Visible Justice will engage with juridical forms such as tribunals, evidence, transcripts, and testimony, exploring their potential to generate new legal imaginaries. Working collectively, they seek to understand the myriad meanings of justice so that, together, we may try to imagine ‘what love looks like in public’.
Central to Visible Justice’s work is the role of the image. Through visual practice, the collective explores the body in its lived and felt dimensions: its haptic and somatic experiences, its capacity to bear witness, and the long-term and intergenerational impacts of detention, hunger strikes, force-feeding, famine, and gender-based violence. Visible Justice traces the historical threads connecting issues such as occupation, deportation, breathability and climate colonialism across different geographies, examining legal strategies and forms of protest. Moving between image, voice, text, and performance, the programme aims to cultivate a deeply felt experience of community that is in itself a form of resistance.
About Visible Justice
Visible Justice is a research collective based at University of the Arts London, founded by David Birkin and Max Houghton in 2019. It aims to foster creative collaborations across disciplinary lines and to deepen the discourse around questions of visuality, ethics, aesthetics, and political voice. At its core is a concern for conceptions of justice that lie beyond the structures and strictures of legal orthodoxy: from the reparative and restorative to the social, racial, economic, and environmental.
Visible Justice: the body, its shadow, dreams, and imaginaries...
Wed 20 May, 6:30 – 8:30pm
This opening event focuses on questions of visibility and resistance against the forces of invasion, occupation, segregation, and violence. Bringing together photographic artist Amak Mahmoodian, legal scholar Patricia J. Williams, and poets Sunnah Khan and Haia Mohammed, alongside a short film by Walid Raad, the speakers will explore how image and voice can resist and reframe dominant narratives, from Palestine to Lebanon and Iran.
David Birkin
Max Houghton
Bryan van der Beek
