1996

Public art project and video installation

Variable dimensions

Loop: 62’ 

Question Marks is a project of communication and art exchange between two groups of prisoners who had never met before: a group of ten adult inmates (all of them serving long–term sentences) at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta (USP Atlanta) and a group of 30 teens from the Fulton County Child Treatment Center. For three months, daily workshops held at both facilities started a communication process between these groups via the regular exchange of videos they made about life in confinement. This exchange was then edited by the artists and extended to a series of interventions in public space in order to carry these reflections beyond the prison and into society.

The artistic program entitled Conversations at the Castle, curated by Mary Jane Jacob and Homi Bhabha as a critical counter–point to the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, became one of the most radical and important exhibitions of the decade in the United States. The penal institutions Dias & Riedweg chose to work with were in the immediate vicinity of the Olympic stadiums. One of the artists’ actions was to get the prisoners to formulate questions and paint them onto license–plates, which were then attached to cars parked around the city. In the US, many of the official license plates are produced by prisoners doing jail time.