Zora J Murff | At No Point In Between

Église Des Freres Precheurs, Rencontres D' Arles

4 July - 29 August 2021

At No Point in Between takes as its subject the African-American neighborhood of North Omaha, Nebraska. Showing portraits of the neighborhood’s inhabitants alongside urban landscapes, the series evokes a social environment profoundly determined by a succession of racist policies and by the injustice that has reigned there since its inception. Combining humanist and topographical research on the one hand and archival analysis on the other, Murff focusses on the complex tangle of violence impacting the city’s black community: that of odious crimes, such as the lynching of Will Brown (1919), the assassination of Vivian Strong (1969) or the recent police violence documented on videos that have circulated widely through the social media; but also the systemic violence of governmental decisions that have affected the community slyly and no less calamitously, resulting in social and economic exclusion, such as the redlining of the neighborhood by urban planners. The bodies and the places we see here all bear the stigmata of racism, which remains today a dominant aspect of the Black experience in the United States.