Cross-examination

24 May – 9 August 2025

Beaconsfield, London

Cross-examination is a wall text piece, hand-painted in situ at Beaconsfield over the course of the exhibition ‘Manifesto for Sustainable Experimentation’. It is a meditation on the role of artistic expression and experimentation in challenging the creeping repression of freedoms that we are witnessing today.

The work comprises an excerpt from a cross-examination of the artist in the High Court as part of a five-year libel case brought against him by two members of the far right, in what has been dubbed ‘the free speech trial of our age’. The case saw Turner interrogated under oath for three days by the claimants’ leading counsel, who advanced a series of conspiracy theories about him—often antisemitic in nature—surrounding his artworks, his writing, and his public stance in opposing the emergence of contemporary manifestations of fascism.

Cross-examination presents an exchange in which passages of Turner’s 2011 artwork, The Metamodernist Manifesto, are read to the Court in an effort to prove the incoherence of his work, and to link this to an unrelated academic piece of anti-fascist writing that the claimants had falsely attributed to him. In doing so, the barrister inadvertently makes a case for the meaninglessness and futility of both art and anti-fascist resistance.

The judge ruled in the artist’s favour.