Gesche Würfel | At the Hands of Persons Unknown

This past Friday, Pictura hosted a new installation and artist talk with Gesche Würfel on her series At the Hands of Persons Unknown. Here is the artist statement:

​‘At the Hands of Persons Unknown’ explores how trees have been silent witnesses to the lynchings of women in the United States.

I was motivated to create this series because I am a white German woman married to an African American man. We live in the American South, and if we had been born a generation earlier, our relationship would have been illegal, if not cause to be lynched. The landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Loving vs. Virginia, only ended the prohibition on interracial marriage in 1967.

Rather than photographing trees which were supposedly known to be used for lynchings, which are difficult to verify, I photographed old Southern trees as ​“stand-ins”. I made this decision after my mother-in-law first visited us in the South, when she said that she couldn’t look at an old Southern tree without imaging them as lynching trees. Through long exposure and movement of the camera, the trees and the branches I captured were rendered abstract, almost ghostlike.

-Gesche Würfel

Photos from the event: