Video Art and Mass Incarceration

The Video Art and Mass Incarceration compilation includes works from the Video Data Bank collection that focus on the rapid expansion of prisons during the end of the 20th Century in the United States. Since the time of slavery, the criminal justice system has been a continual source of racially-biased injustice and oppression, and the rise of mass incarceration serves as an expansion of those existing policies. The compilation showcases the ways that video artists in the 1990s used the medium as a means to understand the reality of prisons, and create a more equitable and collaborative dialogue between themselves and incarcerated people. Featuring the work of Lawrence Andrews, Harun Farocki, Annie Goldson & Chris Bratton, and Laurie Jo Reynolds, Video Art and Mass Incarceration connects touchstones of experimental video to the politics of the movement to defund policing and defend Black life.

The included works are further contextualized in the essay Video Art and Mass Incarceration by programmer Zach Vanes.