Creating Art Out of Crime

Katherine Biber, University of Technology, Sydney, Faculty of Law, is publishing In Crime's Archive: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence in the British Journal of Criminology. Here is the abstract.

This article explores the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. During the criminal trial, strict rules govern the collection, admission and interpretation of evidence at trial. However, after the conclusion of the trial, this material returns to a notional ‘archive’ and is sometimes used by artists, scholars, curators and others, but subject to no rules nor standards. This article examines a range of instances in which criminal evidence has been used post-trial, and proposes a jurisprudence of sensitivity for responding to the harm that is sometimes done when criminal evidence leads a cultural afterlife.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.