Andres Serrano

In 2005, the New York Times magazine asked Andres Serrano to produce images dealing with torture for the cover and lead article "What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Torture" by Joseph Lelyveld. For ten years Andres Serrano returned to the subject regularly, until a recent collaboration with the organization a/political (which works to support and promote artists working in the socio-political field) for one of his most ambitious projects to date.

For a year, Andres Serrano was granted access to singular and restricted sites (in Berlin, Dachau, Buchenwald, in Kent, England, in Sudan...). The series of photographs produced can thus be understood as a cabinet of curiosities that follows the evolution of punitive and coercive techniques through time and place.
The term Torture, defined by the Oxford dictionary as "the use of extreme pain, as punishment or as a means of persuasion", has endured for centuries. While the result remains the same, the technique and means have evolved. Torture, once physical, now extends to mental torture, sanctioned as psychological violence legitimized under the aegis of terror.

In this new series, Andres Serrano assumes the role of the artist in search of new sensitive forms of representation, but also the symbolic role of the executioner, as if to get closer to the unspeakable.
If he begins with a methodical study of the instruments and machines dedicated to torture since the Middle Ages, where each terrible find is seen as a disturbing still life, he then focuses on symbolic places of torture, from prisons to the interrogation offices of the Stasi through the death camps, to finally try to represent the torture practiced from the beginning to today.