On Thursday, May 21st at 6 pm CET Sterling Ruby will present his film STATE on Sprüth Magers’ Instagram account.
Sterling Ruby’s STATE (2019, 33:10 min) takes as its subject the 35 adult state prisons of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), set to a soundtrack composed and performed by the artist. A project five years in the making, the video premiered at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, in February 2019. Its themes of surveillance and institutional injustice have taken on a new urgency in the era of COVID-19, which is spreading rapidly and seemingly uncontrolled through prison populations nationwide. Through STATE’s contrasts of regimented penal architectures and lush California vistas surrounding them, the film urges us to consider the structural repression inherent to these institutions.
