Interview with the artist, Jan 2024 (4 mins 20 secs)

Biography

Carey Young’s work across video, photography, text, performance and installation explores relations between the body, language, rhetoric, and systems of power. Early in her practice she was inspired by business and economics, using the tools, language and rituals appropriated from multinational corporations as starting points for her installations, performances, text works and videos. Since 2002 Young has created conceptual and lens-based works which address and critique law and justice in the light of artistic foci such as the body, site, materiality, portraiture or the sublime. A further strand in her practice relates to women, addressed in relation to regimes of power such as law or the camera’s gaze.

Young’s work has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at Modern Art Oxford (2023), Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2020), La Loge, Brussels (2019), Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2019), Dallas Museum of Art (2017), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2013), The Power Plant, Toronto (2009), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2009), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2009), MiMA (Middlesbrough, 2010) and John Hansard Gallery (Southampton, 2001). Her group shows include Jeu de Paume, Paris (2022), Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2018), Aspen Art Museum (2016), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2015), Tate Liverpool (2014-15), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2012), New Museum, New York (2011), Tate Britain (2009–10), ICA (London, 2003) and The Photographers’ Gallery (London, 1999) amongst many others. She has participated in numerous biennials, including Moscow (2013, 2007), Taipei (2010), Sharjah (2005), and Venice (2003).

Works in public collections include Tate Gallery, Centre Pompidou, Sharjah Art Foundation, Arts Council Collection, Dallas Museum of Art, Busan Museum of Art, Kadist Foundation and Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. In 2021 she was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and in 2022 she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and an Honorary Research Fellowship at the Institute of Research on Law and Justice (IERDJ), Paris. Two monographs on her work have been published: Subject to Contract (JRP Ringier, 2013), and Carey Young: Incorporated (Film and Video Umbrella and John Hansard Gallery, 2001). Young is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Carey Young has given lectures on her work at Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Cambridge and Oxford University, as well as in conferences at Tate Modern, MoMA (NY), IMMA (Ireland) and Tate Britain. She is Professor in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London.