Entangled with Justice

My father was the warden of a prison compound in Switzerland. I spent the first 18 years of my life in that particular environment witnessing firsthand the cruelty and humanity of incarceration. My father was a true believer in rehabilitation and the need to treat each man with respect and dignity, regardless of their crimes. I am acutely conscious of the vulnerability of prisoners. I have been especially troubled by cases of individuals who were wrongly accused and convicted, their freedom denied for years, trapped in a system without the possibility of a meaningful defense. This body of work was triggered by the horrifying images of the Abu Ghraib prison, but it rests on a deeper personal experience. The hypocrisy and disguise of the "liberators" who quickly became indistinguishable from the dethroned tyrants was a stark reminder of the entanglement of fate, geography, and politics in the direction of justice. I'm preoccupied by questions of arbitrary, random violence carried on between people of different religions, ethnicities, cultures, and viewpoints. My work explores these complex realities and relationships.

The work is photographic in nature, employing the negative of the Polaroid Type 55 film. I photograph my body in the dark with a flashlight as a tool for drawing. After processing the film, I allow it to continue to develop and decay over a period of weeks, sometimes months, before I tone them for permanence. The resulting shapes and forms on my drawings are metaphors for our own unpredictable and exciting existence. Chance is an integral component of my work. All these photographs are part performance, part drawing and part chance.

Each photograph is unique. The size is 3.5x4.5"