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123
Jenny Holzer, Redaction Paintings, 2005-2008

Chapter: Small Right Hand Down - Democracy and Freedom

Information

Who owns the information?
Jenny Holzer’s series of Redaction Paintings, created between 2005 and 2008, remains extremely topical. It addresses a theme that continues to spark heated global debates, particularly in the context of the Epstein Files: who owns information, who is allowed to see what, and what is concealed from the public, and for what reasons. “Redacted” means “edited,” but one could just as easily say “censored.” The documents on which Holzer’s images are based originate from the context of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and were released to the public by US authorities after a certain period had elapsed.

Abu Ghraib
The works also address the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi inmates at the notorious prison were abused, raped, and often tortured to death by guards. Holzer downloaded these documents, mostly faxes or copies of copiesk, from the Internet, enlarged them significantly, and screen-printed them onto canvases primed with monochrome oil paint.

Filed away
The small right hand imprinted in Holzer’s silkscreen painting Small Right Hand Down blue white belonged to Emad Kazem Taleb, an Iraqi civilian who died in US custody at Abu Ghraib prison. Where documents are missing and people cannot write, only physical traces remain within bureaucratic processes. Precisely because of the silkscreen printing and the oil paint applied by hand to the canvas, the hand appears as testimony to the disappearance of a person who has been erased by a bureaucratic system and filed away.

Structural conditions of war
Jenny Holzer’s Redaction Paintings “draw your attention not simply to the details of the U.S. war on terror, but to the structural and political conditions that made it possible,” writes Joshua Craze in the catalogue for the exhibition Jenny Holzer: War Paintings at the Museo Correr, shown in Venice in 2015 in collaboration with the Written Art Collection.

Nothing but bureaucracy
Holzer’s silkscreen works are commentaries on US politics, but also on American painting. In their formal coolness, they recall Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series from the early 1960s. Holzer indeed uses a range of Warhol’s color tones. While Warhol reproduces press photographs of car accidents, suicides, and shootings, Holzer shows no war, no corpses, no torture. Instead, she reveals the brutal bureaucratic and political system in which there are no longer any accountable leaders, only functionaries, bureaucrats, and executors, a system in which prisoners of war are no longer granted basic humanity.


Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

Jenny Holzer, PALM, FINGERS & FINGERTIPS (LEFT HAND) 000406, 2007
Oil in linen
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026
Written Art Collection

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