Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Reasonable Doubt(s) is a multi-part, multi-media examination of the role of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the wrongful convictions of Black people focused on the relation between race, place, identity, and systemic injustice in the US criminal legal system. Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One “Central Valley,” is an immersive, three-channel video installation documenting the history of official misconduct that led to the wrongful conviction of Timothy James Young, an innocent, Black, death row prisoner currently incarcerated in California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. Young’s death penalty conviction in predominantly white Tulare County, California, depended on police misconduct (including suborning the false testimony of a jailhouse informant, witness intimidation, and evidence tampering), prosecutorial misconduct (withholding exculpatory evidence and racially biased jury selection), judicial abuse of discretion, and false or misleading interpretation of forensic evidence. The 40,000-page case file and over 12,000-page transcript of Young’s trial, provide a startling account of a ten-year-long investigation and prosecution riddled with racist abuses. Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One “Central Valley,” delves deeply into this massive set of documents to investigate the investigation and trial, interlacing archival media based on transcripts, case files, and forensic evidence, newly recorded and performed ‘readings’ of transcripts and reports and original interviews with legal experts and case participants. Set in the Central Valley of California, Reasonable Doubt(s): Chapter One also draws a connection between the history of Black migration from the Jim Crow South to the area in the 1930s and 40s, the rise of mass incarceration and the prison building boom in California’s agricultural communities in the 1980s and 90’s, and their disproportionate rates of arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of people from their relatively small and marginalized Black communities. The video installation introduces a media-rich digital archive in which Young’s case history provides a narrative through-line linking stories of official misconduct and racial bias in the cases of five other wrongfully incarcerated Black men from southwestern Ohio and Chester, PA. These Black men, like thousands of others, have been wrongfully imprisoned because of who they are and where they were from - because they lived within a history of racism and economic struggle in which place, race, poverty, and gender predetermine their encounters with police and courts. The correspondences drawn between their case narratives in Reasonable Doubt(s) demonstrate how racism, corruption, official impunity, and indifference to innocence undermine the credibility of the criminal legal system in the United States.

Sharon Daniel is a media artist and scholar who creates interactive and participatory documentary artworks, builds digital archives and writes essays addressing issues of social, racial and environmental injustice, with a particular focus on mass incarceration and the criminal legal system. Her documentary-based art works have been exhibited in museums and festivals internationally such as CPH:DOX, Copenhagen (April-May 2021), in Electronic Literature Organization’s COVID E-Lit exhibition, Bergen, Norway (April 2021), in Barring Freedom, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (Oct – May 2021), in the Museum of Capitalism, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design, NYC, NY (Oct – Dec 2019) in a solo exhibition Secret Injustices, at the Schmidt Center (US, FL, 2017), as an official selection in the Alternate Realities exhibition at Sheffield Doc|Fest (UK, 2016), and in a solo exhibition titled Convictions at STUK Kunstencentrum, (Belgium, 2013). Daniel’s works have also been shown in museums and festivals such as WRO media art biennial 2011 (Poland), Artefact 2010 (Belgium), Transmediale 08 (Germany), the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival DEAF03 (Netherlands), Ars Electronica (Austria), the Lincoln Center Festival (NY/USA), the Corcoran Biennial (Washington DC) and the University of Paris I (France). Her essays have been published in books, including Female Authorship and the Documentary Image (Oxford University Press, in press), Context Providers (Intellect Press 2011), Database Aesthetics (Minnesota University Press 2007) and the Sarai Reader05, as well as in professional journals such as ASAP, Cinema Journal, Leonardo, Studies in Documentary Film and Springerin. Her writings and projects have also been published in online journals such as Stretch, Thresholds and Vectors. Daniel was honored by the Webby Awards in 2008 and the Rockefeller/Tribeca Film Festival New Media Fellowship in 2009. In 2015-16 She was named in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “YBCA 100” – a list of “the creative minds, makers, and pioneers that are asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture”. She was a 2017 Fulbright Scholar at Ulster University in Art, Design and the Built Environment. Daniel was recently awarded a 2023-24 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts.