Seeing Through
In Collaboration with Krystal Shelley and Shevuan Wright
as part of the group exhibition
Guilty, guilty, guilty! Towards a Feminist Criminology
at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany
The group exhibition Guilty, guilty, guilty! Towards a Feminist Criminology undertakes a feminist assessment of jurisdictional power. The focus is on “women on trial”—female artists, “bad mothers,” women defendants and women plaintiffs on a rather lost cause. In this context, the courtroom does not only appear as a site of legal assessment, but primarily as a space in which a political or ideological image of women is always implicitly negotiated and constructed. What else, beyond the juridical paragraphs, is debated here? And how can we render this hidden discourse visible?
“The face of war is unwomanly” stated journalist Svetlana Alexievich in her a seminal book of the same title, and the same seems to apply to the juridical history of female delinquency, women’s lawbreaking, and “unlawful” resistance. As sociologist Carol Smart has argued since the late 1970s, there is striking lack when it comes to assessing a female criminology, and even more so if we dare to think of it as a feminist criminology. To fathom the latter is one of the aims of this project.
Seeing Through is a visual installation that brings together voices and discussion of gender, queerness, carcerality, law and memory. Sam Richardson, Krystal Shelley and Shevuan Wright are all queer artists working in LA with overlapping, and differing, experiences and knowledge of the carceral system. Through their different entry points and experience of carcerality, the law, queerness, gender, race, and more, a visual conversation will be woven to explore and expose the complexities of how “guilt” is most often a circumstance of power structures, state violence and control.
Suspended from the ceiling, the work includes layered transparencies containing images and text, and a legal document that reads somewhat like a scroll. The work challenges the historical notion of “innocence” in opposition to “guilt” through personal and abstract expressions. As the artists evidence in their conversation, there are clear structural and societal reasons as to why the United States Prison system continues to be primarily privatized and impactful to those of marginalized identity.
Beyond the work on display, the three artists are keen to shed attention to the following initiatives and websites:
Description: Private Property Deed of Agreement, Written by Shevaun Wright
‘Private Property’ comprises a conceptual deed between the concepts of Privacy and Property. It aims to unpick the intertwining of these concepts in everyday parlance through the phrase ‘private property', questioning the reasoning that posits the need for privacy in property relations as fundamental to individual protection and citizenship. It troubles this relation, highlighting how it infiltrates conceptions of personhood, suggesting that this conceptual coupling forms the foundational justification for policing, state violence and the prison industrial complex, in turn incarcerating us all metaphorically, conceptually and materially.