In Absentia (2019)

2019
Six risograph prints on paper
20.5 x 14.5 in / 52 x 37 cm
Edition of 3

In Absentia consists of six risograph prints, each of which invokes W.E.B. Du Bois' 20th century graphic style to challenge the question of who is tasked with providing evidence of pain.

In the early 1900s, sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was asked by the US government to conduct research on black rural life in Alabama. After conducting interviews with over 20,000 residents, he and his team of researchers spent months compiling a report filled with text, charts, and tables of data. The report was never published.

The In Absentia series begins from this absence and asks what happens when data is made to disappear by those who seek to obscure the intertwined workings of racism and power. The series of prints, which mimic Du Bois’ graphics, complicate assumptions about data’s veracity. Rather than striving for the goal of Du Bois and his contemporaries — which was to convince US society that Black folks were human and deserved fair treatment—the prints form a meditation on interpretability, questioning why such a fact should need proving.

CREDITS

Titles of individual prints from the In Absentia series:
An Abridged History
This Land Is Your Land
The Great Impossibility
This Land Is My Land
It Could Never Be Large Enough Geography of Domination

Exhibition Overview writen by curator Laura McCrane
Photos by Emile Askey and Lisa Boughter