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In this exhibition, artist Robert Glas invites you to confront views on justice. The prevailing focus on harsh punishment seems almost unchallenged, but this was not always the norm. Until the mid-1980s, there was a lively public and political debate in The Netherlands about which response to criminal behaviour would best serve society in the longer term.
This debate on the effects of the penal system was spearheaded by Rotterdam legal scholar and abolitionist Louk Hulsman. He argued that penal law and incarceration often fuel rather than solve societal problems. With functional criticism and concrete propositions he strived to make a society without a punitive government imaginable. With two video installations, both developed in collaboration with people with immediate experience, Glas reignites a discussion that was actively forgotten.
Glas has questioned various aspects of the justice system throughout his artistic practice. Previously, he looked into asylum procedures, the use of biometrics for identification, and the employment of algorithms for predicting criminal behaviour, examining the implicit violence such state instruments entail. He translates his research into video installations in which opposing perspectives and interests perturb each other.