Output details

Counter Offer

Counter Offer (2008) is a two-part text piece created with the advice of a legal team. The first part contains an offer (of ‘liberty’) and the second a counter offer (of ‘justice’). Through the wording of the contract, these utopian offers (which are central to notions of democracy and human rights) are surrounded by a legal loop in which both are cancelled out in ‘mid air’: through the act of reading, both offers become withdrawn. The work asks: how might law be used as an artistic medium? Can an artwork also be a functional legal contract? How might a moment of poetry be created within a contractual structure? The piece is unique in taking the form of a contract which also presents law as a kind of choreography: the offer and its subsequent withdrawal via a counter offer creates a movement between the first and second parts of the work that is both dialectical and a form of erasure.

The work was commissioned by Electra and Thomas Dane Gallery in 2008. Solo exhibitions featuring this work include Migros Museum (Zurich 2013), The Power Plant (Toronto, 2009), Eastside Projects (Birmingham 2010 and tour to Cornerhouse, Manchester and mima, Middlesbrough), Thomas Dane Gallery (London, 2008). Group exhibitions include Museum as Hub: The Accords, The New Museum, New York, NY. 2011, Permanent Mimesis, curated by Alessandro Rabottini, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy, 2010. Reviewed in Frieze (online, 2009); featured in publications Migros Museum (Zurich 2013), Permanent Mimesis, exhibition catalogue, pub. Electa Mondadori/GAM, Turin, 2010, Art and Text, Black Dog Publishing, London, UK, 2009; discussed in artist talks at venues including Photoworks, Centre Pompidou and the Miami Art Museum and within leading conferences at Tate Modern, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, University of Sussex and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.