"Depicting Criminals"
NEON Gallery, Brösarp, Sweden
june 28 - august 16, 2008
This exhibition is about identity. We often want to simplify identity so that it is only defined by outer appearance, clothes and style. Yet how can we judge another person based solely on appearance? By looking at the nose?
This exhibition is especially about criminal identity, how images live their own lives and influence our reactions. Behind criminal acts there may be complex pattern of cause and consequence, personal histories and psychological explanations.
The picture is never clear. History offers us a rich and complex material:
Pablo Escobar in his self-declared role as a Robin Hood, financing projects
for the poor in Colombia with money he earned with drugs and extortion and
the almost mythical Al - Scarface - Capone in an explosive mix of alcohol,
killings and Mafia romantics. A third type could be someone who just looked
like a
criminal, but was just a poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The exhibition "Depicting criminals" questions our perception of criminals, and our own sometimes simplistic judgements about people. Life would be simple if you could just take a look at someone's nose to know...!
