Blankouts

Rachelle Wunderink creates an immersive installation: pages of text flood the gallery walls, lining the corridor with a black-and-white ombre of documents. Each page holds Wunderink’s personal accounts of assault and harassment—reviewed and altered by one of 25 female-identifying participants instructed to redact or edit the text in any manner they chose. Blankouts examines ways in which society suppresses women’s accounts of assault as the viewer is tasked with deciphering the differences between each page, choosing whether to understand the whole story. The censored documents were reprinted in multiples, mimicking the repetitive nature of trauma. Together, Wunderink’s use of censorship and repetition mirrors trauma-induced psychological fragmentation.