Invisible/Visible

Making the Invisible Visible: Brothers and Sisters creative team Lisa Jelliffe and Kirsten Rutherford have teamed up with the anonymous German street art collective Mentalgassi, to create art installations for Amnesty International. We’ve called the installations ‘Making the invisible visible’. They highlight the case of Troy Davis, a man who has been on death row for 19 years in the USA, despite serious doubts about his conviction. The posters are displayed on fence railings. Front on, you see nothing but bars. Troy’s face only becomes visible from an angle. Please help save Troy from being executed: www.amnesty.org.uk/fence.

Advertising Agency: Brothers And Sisters, London, UK
Creatives: Mentalgassi, Kirsten Rutherford, Lisa Jelliffe
Production: Mentalgassi

I have posted here numerous times on various ad campaigns that Amnesty International has run. This one (which I first saw over at Ads Of the World) is quite slick - part of a campaign for Troy Davis who is on Death Row in Georgia (U.S.A.) and that is something you should read about. Davis is on death row despite the fact that prosecutors presented no physical evidence against him and nearly all of the 'witnesses' they did present have now recanted. The American criminal justice system, being blind, is failing him and, by extension all of us here in the States.

There is a video clip here that helps convey the dynamic aspect of this AI installation. I want to point out the similarity to another piece of art that was included in an exhibit a few years ago - Los Desaparecidos. I have in mind the piece 30,000 by Argentinian artist Nicolas Guagnini, the title of which refers to the number of people who were 'disappeared' by the Military junta in the late 1970s.

Like the AI installation, 30,000 has a dynamic aspect. The face, taken from a photograph of Guagnini's father, a journalist who was disappeared in 1977, appears, vanishes, and reappears as the viewer moves around or past the work. Where the AI installation uses black bars for effect, the ghostly black and white of 30,000 conveys the invisibility that is one legacy of dictatorship in Argentina. Need I belabor the analogy?