The V&A acquires six works by Diana Matar from her series My America.
In the US, approximately 1000 people continue to die each year in encounters with police. More than any other industrialised nation. My America is an archive of and memorial to victims of these encounters. The photographs, taken at locations where citizens were shot or tasered by law enforcement officers, create a quiet but chilling critique of the contemporary United States.
Working within the genres of landscape and documentary the photographs are of city parks, empty fields, storefronts, front lawns, mobile homes, and roadside highways. By focusing on these banal landscapes, Matar declares that what happened at the locations matters and questions the link between landscape and memory.
'Can a photograph tell us anything about what has happened before the photographer arrives? I'm not sure. But even if not, I believe there is value in documenting the ground where violence has taken place... Perhaps a photograph can offer ways to remember acts of injustice that have been forgotten or never made transparent.'
