Lucie Pia on Cameron Rowland at bookshop

Cameron Rowland’s artistic practice considers the legal foundations and material manifestations of racial inequality. His works confront systems of disenfranchisement and expropriation which, in their service to capital, continue to bind ‘universal’ rights of freedom and equality to a white citizenship.

Adopting the operations and processes of various industries (commercial, legal-economic, artistic), his exhibitions often trace a genealogy of racially conditioned juridical structures and their deployment by state institutions and private organisations.

«91020000», presented at Artist Space, New York in 2016, addressed forced labor within the US-prison-industrial complex. «D37», at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles in 2018, concerned the financialisation of criminal prosecution via property seizures.

Examining both, this lecture explores Rowland’s work as a direct confrontation with the mechanisms of self-preservation inherent to racialised capitalism and racialised property – mechanisms also maintained by the operations and processes of the art industry.

This event takes place at bookshop, Limmatstrasse 214, Zürich 8005.

Organised by Matthew Hanson.