Index selected at Kunstkritikk
At their traditional Advent Calendar, the invited guests at Kunstritikk are selecting the exhibition with Jordan Strafer at Index as one of the best moments of the year.
Tore Hallas writes:
“The work is a recording of a real-life trial, yet that fact seems almost irrelevant: the absurd internal logic at play here belongs to an entirely different world. I left having fallen utterly in love with the late 80s pastiche, the horrible make-up prosthetics, and, especially, one of the female performers who gives a masterclass in the very thing that Susan Sontag describes in Notes on Camp as the difference between camp and non-camp: a woman versus a “woman.” This ‘woman’ is a ‘witness’ in the ‘case’ – more so than anyone else has ever been – and her monosyllabic answers and fluttering facial expressions left me all warm and fuzzy inside. It’s hard to be genuinely funny in contemporary art. Most people who try fail, but here the humour was so deeply embedded in the work’s self-congratulatory DNA that I couldn’t help but laugh.”
Hanna Johansson writes:
“Jordan Strafer’s video installation LOOPHOLE (2023) is based on the trial of John F. Kennedy’s nephew William after he was accused of raping 29-year-old Patricia Bowman in 1991. Truth be told, it’s more interesting as a set of aesthetic references and vibes – 80s and 90s erotic thrillers, celebrity culture, televised trials, the coldly gluttonous transformation of horrific crimes into easily digestible entertainment by the media and the era – than as a film, but it has stayed with me because of the favourably uncanny mix of production value and amateurishness, and for its peculiarity.”