Shame Punishments

Artists

Andrea Büttner

Press release

In Andrea Büttner’s recent installation Shame Punishments (2022–23), the artist presents an array of historical images of the public humiliation of people in different centuries and contexts.

By rendering the images barely visible, Büttner emphasizes their paradoxical status: the shame they represent or elicit is contingent on their visibility and exposure. Büttner’s Shame Punishments constructs a genealogy of these ambivalent motifs, which find an echo in the circulation in social media images of public shaming.