Work
JUDGE ME
A courtroom performance that stages value conflict through accusation, evidence, testimony, jury, and the procedure of verdict.
Research Question
How does value get judged, how is legitimacy assigned, and how do those judgments become internalized inside subjects and institutions?
Format
Scripted performance, courtroom trial, audience participation
JUDGE ME is a 105-minute performance structured as a court trial in which the artist appears simultaneously as plaintiff and defendant. The work investigates how systems of social value and legitimacy become internalized as structures of self-judgment.
Six witnesses from different professions testify on both sides, while the audience functions as the jury, casting votes through specially developed software throughout the performance. Developed through surveys, street interviews, workshops, and extensive conversations, the testimonies were transformed into a script governed by the logic of the courtroom itself.
Rather than treating judgment as a private psychological process, the work places questions of self-worth, recognition, and legitimacy within a public institutional framework. By appropriating the legal apparatus of testimony, evidence, deliberation, and verdict, JUDGE ME examines how individuals come to measure themselves through systems of value inherited from society. The project premiered at Meteor Festival in Bergen in 2021, was selected for ISPA’s 2023 New Works program, and received the Arte Laguna Prize in 2024.
The work combines field mapping, surveys and street interviews, witness workshops, expert contextualization, script recomposition, and dynamic jury voting. Real speech and public assumptions are transformed into a courtroom-like performance structure.
Outcomes
- Public adjudication
- Claimant-defendant structure
- Witness system
- Expert testimony
- Dynamic jury
- Authorial rupture
- Modular dispute frame
- Unresolved closure
Documentation Gallery
Related Labs
Related Research & Writing
JUDGE ME: Value, Judgment, and Legitimacy as Public Procedure
A research essay on how JUDGE ME stages value judgment as a public procedure through testimony, evidence, jury, and verdict.
Do We Need Artists?
The two closing statements of JUDGE ME, in which the artist argues both sides of her own trial.
Asbjørn Grønstad on JUDGE ME and Post Capitalistic Auction
A synthesis of Grønstad’s reading of JUDGE ME and Post Capitalistic Auction in relation to neoliberalism, justice, artistic labour, and value.