Suspects

Info

Media

Concept

Info

1997

Installation of 14 chromogenic prints, performance, questionnaire, photographic portfolio

Media

Images
Installation
Portfolio

Concept

Suspects with subtitle The Seven Sinners and the Seven Righteous is a study in indeterminacy, locating the Other in the Other, where psychosis or sanity, guilt or innocence, threat or promise are shown to occupy each body as much as or at the same time as any other. The work consists of a series of 14 large-scale photographic portraits featuring a frontal view of an equal number of girls, none of whom has yet turned 18, as well as an attendant performance element requiring audience participation. Seven of these portraits present children from a Moscow school, all daughters from well-to-do Russian families; the other seven — while formally identical to the previous portrayals, with young ladies in red lipstick, rouged face, donning colored crew neck shirts of their choice, set against a neutral background — the artists photographed inside the walls of a high security detention facility, portraying child murderers, each convicted of brutal, unmotivated killings. The performative or participatory element, presented on the occasion of the exhibition’s opening, included a younger girl in a red dress, red shoes, and elegant red gloves distributing lottery tickets to spectators with which they were meant to guess, by any rubric they might care to choose, which of the children were innocent and which were guilty. Given that the photographs are all identical in format, the artists deprive viewers of any indication of social, economic, or psychological context by which to judge the culpability of the girls. Ultimately exposing the spectator’s biases, often influenced by mass media and/or determining norms of visual culture, the work uses innocence and guilt as material in its signifying schema. Rather than seeking simply to discredit the innocence of childhood, the project’s aim is to reveal both the essential fallacy of any judgment made on the basis of appearance alone and the critical ambiguity of those who lurk behind otherwise indistinguishable visages. The identity of the girls, and their status as guilty or innocent, is never revealed by the artists.

Inaugurating AES+F’s use of childhood as medium for critical examination of social values, Suspects constitutes the first in a series of works involving the voluntary participation of children. The artists initiated the project in a prison for girls, selecting seven participants from those convicted of violent crime willing to be photographed. Seven additional girls, of unblemished character, innocent of any crime, were selected from the Moscow school and photographed in precisely the same manner as the previous cohort. The artists imparted to all the young ladies that their anonymity would be protected, but that the images were destined for exhibition. The work itself was presented as a discreet installation of photographs in a circular configuration, placing the viewer at the center of a violent roulette of sin and righteousness.

Suspects was first shown in a solo exhibition at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse, France in 1998. It was then included in the exhibition After the Wall at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1999 and in the annual French photography festival, Arles Rencontres de la Photographie in 2004 (under the auspices of the Moscow House of Photography). In 2007, the work enjoyed exposure at multiple venues, including as part of the AES+F mid-career retrospective at the Russian State Museum; at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art; at the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas; and as part of an exhibition at Passage de Retz in Paris entitled AES+F: Le Vert Paradis, which later traveled to MACRO Future in Rome as AES+F: Il Paradiso Verde in the following year. More recently, this project was included in the exhibitions Detective at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in parallel with the Moscow Young Art Biennale in 2014 and included in Kollektsia! at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2016.