BLACK LISTS
FROM THE SERIES: TOTALITARIAN ABC-DARY


SERIES OF FIFTY DRAWINGS: GRAPHITE DRAWING AND PERFORATION ON PAPER
PAPER, GRAPHITE, NAIL/ NEEDLE
CHEB, CZECH REPUBLIC


2020



Black Lists is a series of fifty drawings on paper covered with graphite, on whose surface the names of people killed by communist border guards while attempting to cross the Czechoslovak border are inscribed. The names are “written” by perforating the paper with a nail or a needle.

The names are sourced from the Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů (Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Czech Republic). The work is grounded in two essential processes: perforation and illumination. Through the light passing through the incisions, a hidden truth is revealed.

In this gesture, writing ceases to be a mere inscription and becomes both a wound and a form of visibility. Light exposes what power attempted to erase: the memory of lives interrupted at the margins of history and along its borders.