LOUCHE OPS                                                       

‘Violence and Brutality’ is an exhibition of photographs and ceramics. Two serial works recreate two passages from an essay and a novel by French writer Jean Genet.

The set of handmade ceramic knives recall a set of improvised shivs described by Genet in his essay The Criminal Child. On a visit to a juvenile prison like the one in which he spent his childhood, Genet is shown several tin knives made by the inmates. Despite their apparent lack of utility as weapons, the director has confiscated the knives and locked them in a drawer. In The Criminal Child, Genet argues for the symbolic violence of these objects.

The photographs document the artist in a series of stores in Vienna, engaging in a ‘game’ based on one played by a character in Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers. To practice shoplifting, the petty criminal Darling purchases small items from a department store before returning them to the shelf and ‘stealing’ them. These photographs were taken without the stores’ knowledge by two accomplices with a borrowed medium-format camera on stolen reels of film.

The exhibition’s title is taken from an essay of the same name by Genet, published in Le Monde in September 1977. In it, Genet uses the case of political terrorism, in particular the actions of the Baader-Meinhof Group, to distinguish between the oppressive brutality of the carceral and colonial state and acts of liberatory violence undertaken in response.