WHEN:
October 28, 2024–July 13, 2025
WHERE:
The Met Fifth Avenue
Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography
Gallery 851
New York
For more information and tickets visit the Met website.
A spokesperson describes the event as follows:
“…The exhibition will present three major immersive contemporary installations by Krimes alongside 19th-century photographs from The Met collection by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon, who developed the first modern system to target and identify people charged with crimes before the adoption of fingerprinting. A precursor of mug shots, this system was developed to combat rising rates of recidivism in 19th-century Paris by linking an alleged suspect’s anthropomorphic measurements with an identifying photograph. This exhibition marks the first time that Krimes’s two installations, Purgatory (2009) and Apokaluptein:16389067 (2010-13), created while serving a six-year prison sentence, will be shown together in their full iterations. Purgatory was acquired by the Museum in 2024…"
“...Shown alongside nearly 150 cartes de visite of suspected anarchists by Bertillon, Krimes’s monumental image-based installations present an opportunity to reconsider the perceived neutrality of our systems of identification and the hierarchies of social imbalance they create and reinscribe. The pairing underlines how Bertillon’s system contributed to the problematic ways in which these images dehumanize their subjects…"
"...Krimes’s Purgatory and Apokaluptein:16389067 reflect the ingenuity of an artist working in a federal penitentiary without access to traditional materials. Purgatory transforms nearly 300 prison-issued soaps, playing cards, and newspapers into a work of art that seeks to disrupt and recontextualize the circulation of photographs in the media. Using a hand printing technique invented over the course of a year in solitary confinement, Krimes transferred faces of “offenders” from newspapers onto the surface of the wet soap. These portraits were placed into a hole cut into a deck of playing cards, replacing the faces of kings, queens, and jacks to critique and comment on the social and circumstantial influences of society and our ability to play the hands we are each dealt…."
“...The second major work in the exhibition, Apokaluptein:16389067, is a 40-foot mural constructed of 39 bed sheets and made over the course of his final three years at the Fairton Federal Correctional Institution. The surreal landscape depicts heaven, earth, and hell through a collage of source material lifted from The New York Times over the period 2010–13. Fragmented and inverted, these headlines and stories draw the observer into the reality of Krimes’s lens and invite the viewer to experience the outside world through the artist’s incarcerated perspective…"
“...Finally, the exhibition debuts Naxos (2024), an installation by Krimes that mirrors and deconstructs Apokalupteinand is composed of more than 9,000 pebbles gathered from prison yards and shared with the artist by incarcerated individuals around the country. Each hand-wrapped pebble is suspended from a needle and each individual thread pulled from recreated image transfers of Apokaluptien..."
