the violent transaction

The violent transaction shows a correspondence between Frankie Fleming and Jana Coorevits about their respective relationships to violence and possibilities for repair.

After years of writing to each other, the artists began to envision their exchange as a poetic and allusive way to speak about harm and its many ripple effects.

Implicit in the intimacy of the writing is the question of safety – does telling our stories necessarily create more safety? How can we speak freely, even in a personal correspondence, when we see repeated examples of how speaking truth to power causes further harm? And what does it mean to want to share those stories publicly with this tension so present?

At once transparent and opaque, the prints trace an attempt at using language to understand experiences with violence. They explore the need and precarity of making oneself legible. Redaction became an important tool for personal safety and to visually represent the unspeakable. There is a resistance against the demand to be legible and repeat stories over and over to be taken seriously, to be granted reparation. Instead the artists grant that to each other and themselves through an alternative mode of sharing, seeing and being seen.