In this lecture, Professor T.J. Demos asks: How do contemporary artistic practices interrogate and reimagine the meaning of justice, treating it not as a fixed legal or political principle but as a speculative, affective, and aesthetic terrain, torn and always more than itself?

In an era marked by legalized injustice, the everyday brutalities of late racial fascism, and the normalization of ecocide-genocide, the global institutions of liberal democratic order are collapsing. It seems justice itself is weeping. Suspended between redress and endless deferral, justice names oppression but may never materialize within the state’s colonial futurity. Yet aesthetic practice moves beyond these limits, reimagining justice as a horizon of liberation grounded in memory, embodied experience, and the steadfast refusal to disappear.

Beginning with Claudia Rankine’s assertion that “there is no justice…there’s ‘just us’,” this lecture explores how art grapples with the gap between abstract ideals and lived realities. Through three case studies, US artist jackie sumell’s Solitary Garden, UK-based Forensic Architecture’s Environmental Racism in Death Alley, and Palestinian artist Vivien Sansour’s Heirloom Seed Library and Traveling Kitchen, Professor T.J. Demos considers the ways in which social, environmental, and climate in/justice is embodied, enacted, and imagined through creative forms.

Artwork credit: Jackie Sumell, Solitary Gardens, UC Santa Cruz. The garden plots are meant to represent a solitary confinement cell, taking up the same 6-by-9-foot space.