NADA New York 2022

In the early 1900s, the U.S. federal government asked sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois to conduct research on Black, rural life in Alabama. Using interviews with over 20,000 residents, he and a team of researchers spent months compiling a report of text, charts, and tables of data. Ultimately, the report was never published. In Absentia begins from this removal and asks what happens when data is made to disappear by those who seek to obscure the intertwined workings of racism and power. The series of prints, which mimic Du Bois’ graphics, complicate assumptions about data’s veracity in both presence and absence. Rather than striving for the goal of Du Bois and his contemporaries — which was to convince U.S. society that Black folks were human and deserved fair treatment—the prints question why such a fact should need evidential proof, and form a meditation on interpretability.