Seeing through Stone addresses incarceration as a global problem that is inextricable from capitalism, colonialism, and militarization. As a 2023 study by Penal Reform International shows, laws that target poor and marginalized communities are continuing to grow global rates of incarceration and propelling large-scale investment in new and expanded prisons in countries around the world. There are 11.5 million people currently held in forms of captivity worldwide, one-third of whom have yet to be convicted of any crime. This includes in prisons, detention centers, and other surveillance infrastructures.
The soaring numbers of people behind bars all over the world and the increasing profitability of the means of holding them captive is one of the most dramatic examples of the destructive tendencies of global capitalism.
Angela y Davis, Freedom is a constant struggle
All Eyes on Palestine
One of the functions of incarceration, as Kelley Lytle Hernández argues in her book City of Inmates, is to eliminate unwanted populations. According to the UN, since 1967 Israel has detained approximately one million Palestinians in the occupied territory, including tens of thousands of children. The UN special rapporteur also consider the occupied territories themselves a “constantly surveilled open-air prison.” Now the world is witnessing the wholesale, genocidal militarized assault on Gaza.
Two works in Seeing through Stone foreground Palestine as an urgent example of the international links between prisons, war, and colonialism and the need for the prison abolition movement to work internationally.
Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit at Al-Haq
Platform for Gaza, 2024
Al-Haq was established in 1979 as the first Palestinian human rights organization and one of the first of its kind in the Middle East. Since its inception in 2020, the FAI Unit has worked to carry on Al-Haq’s mission to protect and promote Palestinian rights and liberation while cultivating a new understanding of how this tradition of monitoring and documentation can function in Palestine. For this art piece, the Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit at Al-Haq is employing OSINT tools to scrape social media and satellite analysis to harvest all available visual evidence to track the ongoing assault on Gaza and the Palestinian people. As the Israeli occupation has blocked access to Gaza, including by cutting-off mobile networks and internet access during its colossal assault on Palestinians in the strip, this piece represents the FAI unit’s work to continue to record conditions on the ground and to bring them into public view.
Al Haq Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit: They Are Shooting at Our Shadows
The Freedom Theatre
Your Time is Not Your Time, 2024
This film centers on a discussion between members of The Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp. Taking place while Jenin is under siege in 2024, the conversation is organized around time, space, and liberation. Members share the lost meaning of time–the impossibility of relying on plans, or scheduling appointments. One of the members states time does not even exist for them: it only exists as personal moments in which they notice that they are still alive, for example, after surviving a raid. Another member mentions the crisis brought by the sheer repetition of violent events, as they relive past traumas through similarity with recent attacks or torture episodes. Individual feelings and reflections mark a collective experience of trauma in which every aspect of one’s routine is deeply repressed.
From Chicago to Guantánamo
Through installations, performances, podcasts and more, the Tea Project traces the ongoing relationships between the US military and global policing. Drawing on the image of the “torture tree” (Laurence Ralph, The Torture Letters, 2020) as a metaphor for torture reaching across borders, the Tea Project focuses on uncovering moments of beauty and shared humanity when technologies of violence are co-opted or converted into systems of community-building.
Tea Project (Amber Ginsburg & Aaron Hughes)
Ode to the Sea, 2023/4
The ship’s sail that anchors this installation is constructed of stitched-together military uniforms of the type worn by guards at Guantánamo and made by imprisoned people in the US. Against this grim backdrop, artworks by men formerly and currently held in Guantánamo assert hope and transcendence. These include a remarkable ship made by Moath al-Alwi out of scavenged materials. Using prayer beads alongside thread from his shirt and prayer cap, he fashioned an emancipatory transport to sail the sea.
Tea Project (Amber Ginsburg & Aaron Hughes)
Remaking the Exceptional, 2022
Reflecting on over a decade of the project’s researching and compiling stories, Remaking the Exceptional is a series of nine screen prints that highlight the interwoven relations between state violence and creative resistance. The works track the often latent connections between tea, torture, and survival, and how they coexist in a complex global network.
Land Reform & Worker Rights
Police repression and incarceration of protestors is part of the networked systems of power that prison abolitionists are working to dismantle. Seeing through Stone includes several works by artist Cian Dayrit that chart contemporary manifestations of colonial dispossession in the Philippines. In the 16th century, the Spanish claimed state ownership of the land and indentured farmers to feudal landowners. Despite independence and the passing of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program in 1988, the farmers who were supposed to benefit from this reform continue to struggle for land and rights. The ongoing repression of farmer-led movements in the Philippines demonstrates the use of prisons, policing, and surveillance architecture to sustain existing material inequalities.
These economic and land policies create a kind of social incarceration– a general suspended state that is experienced like incarceration. I think about how it affects the body. On Negros Island, there is this word tigirui which means something beyond starving. When you’re starving, hunger is felt in your stomach. But tigirui is when hunger gnaws also in your mind. It’s the long, internalized starvation that just eats at you.
Cian dayrit, artist
Mixed media and embroidery on fabric
6 x 5 feet
Mixed media and embroidery on fabric
6 x 5 feet
Feudal Fields, Dayrit’s earliest tapestry made in 2018 maps the massacre of farmers protesting on the sugar cane estate at Hacienda Luisita in 2004. Dayrit said: “I made Feudal Fields out of that particular narrative to show it’s not just a static story that ended in 2004, but part of a continuous ongoing thing, recurrent in different spaces and in different times.” Protests in Tinang in June 2022 are the subject of Feudal Fields II: Tinang. During that action, artists, writers, and activists joined farmers to participate in an act of collective land cultivation known as bungkalan, a form of protest in which cash crops are uprooted and replaced with food crops. This led to the arrest of 83 activists, including the artist. Both these tapestries have QR codes stitched into them, connecting viewers to more information on the continuing struggles of farmers at Hacienda Luisita and Hacienda Tinang, including a petition for the 2022 charges to be dropped against all 83 protestors.
In addition to the Philippines, Palestine, and Guantánamo, artists in Seeing through Stone address historical and contemporary forms of incarceration in Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Haiti, and Hong Kong as well as at the US-Mexico border. By bringing the works -and the artists- together, the exhibition aims to both give a sense of the scale of violent captivity globally and also build upon the existing networks of abolitionist imagining and organizing already taking place around the world.
