Lisa Stuckey’s dissertation critically examines the connection between contemporary art and jurisdiction. Legal theory and practice are questioned in relation to art, and art theory and practice are opened up to the law in order to understand their instructive relations and to trace the implications of shifted «valorization spheres» (Guattari 2013).

The focus lies on the research agency Forensic Architecture, which investigates current ecological crises and crimes against humanity to bring them to the exhibition hall and the courtroom. The processual products, created through cartographic cross-examinations, are pieces of evidence that are distributed in both legal and art contexts. Nevertheless, the agency makes no claim to art; the reference system is the law and its media conditions. Stuckey’s study subjects this self-conception to a «symptomatic reading» (Althusser 1972).

A comprehensive art-theoretical and transdisciplinary reappraisal of «investigative aesthetics» is the intent of this dissertation. The term, which is initially derived from the agency, serves as an operative concept to be illuminated in regard to media aesthetics and theory politics. This draws attention to the changed role of museums and courts and makes a transformed use of media visible: changing from the «artist-as-ethnographer» (Foster) to the «artist-as-detective» through techniques of forensics and espionage. These new dimensions of uncovering, which follow the «institutional critique» in the art of the 1990s, lead to a functional change in art. Why it is aesthetic and poetic procedures that are entrusted with a radical questioning of social justice—in the sense of «response-ability» (Haraway)—this work analyzes in historical depth.

Dr. Lisa Stuckey is an Art and Cultural Studies researcher. Her interests revolve around contemporary visual cultures, the moving image, forensic art practices, media aesthetics, and critical cultural legal studies. Lisa Stuckey pursued her doctorate in philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with a Fellowship of the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies, a research appointment at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and an associate membership (2019–2020) at the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt. For her PhD-dissertation Law on Trial on “Investigative Aesthetics” situated between arts and jurisdiction, Lisa Stuckey received the Austrian State Prize “Award of Excellence 2021.” It was published under the title Forensische Verfahren in den zeitgenössischen Künsten: Forensic Architecture und andere Fallanalysen (De Gruyter 2022). Furthermore, Lisa Stuckey co-edited (with Alexander Damianisch) the anthology Uncertain Curiosity in Artistic Research, Philosophy, Media and Cultural Studies (Springer, 2025). Currently, Lisa Stuckey is Postdoc at the Institute of Arts and Society, University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Website: https://lisastuckey.net