Uneasy Evidence

Abstract

This article addresses the call for and context of visibility around violence, most specifically when what is engineered after crime is art. Artists who work in the aftermath of injury and fatal violence signal attempts to negotiate the effects of violence and death outside the normative order of law. This article explores work by two artists – Teresa Margolles and Libia Posada – who derive their materials from the fields of medico-legal and forensic practice, and examines the productivity of their aesthetic practice around violence in the light of other social and legal work. For at the same time that law rouses post-violence, aesthetics too is often at play. This article examines the artworks of Margolles and Posada to ask what these art practices offer the public register. In this way, controversial or troubling art practices offer distinct views about death, law and crime in the everyday, and highlight how artists are actively engaged in the production and destabilisation of meaning around violence.