This installation is made of 26 glass plates that are leaning in a long line against a shelf. They appear to be blank, but when looking closely, the shadows of imprints engraved on the glass become visible. Some are impressions of scars from the bodies of anonymous women who have been subjected to domestic violence. Others show words or sentences taken from conversations that the artist had with these women in London. The artist employed forensic techniques to transfer the skin marks onto the glass. The panels bear traces of the visible crimes that have been committed against these women.
This work with the victims of domestic violence should be seen as a complement to other works in this exhibition, for example, to A Color of Time (2014). What connects them is the empirical, forensic approach, which elsewhere I have called the method of mimetic-indexical transformation. Processes which take their point of departure from concrete actualities are strained against history.
Nadia Kaabi-Linke makes frequent links to seemingly inconspicuous surface phenomena (such as marks, imprints, scratches, etc.) in order to analyze their history of origin. This history is often traumatic and defined by experience of violence, which no longer appears explicitly on the surface, but exists below the skin. The work emerges from a kind of contact print, which has transformative powers. It lifts the individuals from their roles as victims by turning their story, their experience, which has been physically burned into them, into public matter. But this does not happen in an exhibitionist manner, to satisfy the voyeur in us. On the contrary: by means of their translation into artwork, in Impunities the wounds take on another object-like appearance, resembling surfaces scratches and ordinary traces of wear and tear. As such, they become “Reflections from Damaged Life” (Adorno), to which the unharmed observer belongs as well.
— Falko Schmieder