Installation view of Kearra Amaya Gopee, marginalia (2026), in If the word we, 59th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (May 2, 2026–January 3, 2027);
photo: Zachary Riggleman / © Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
96" x 96".
brushed steel and aluminum.
During the 1980s, my father was part of a group of police officers called the Flying Squad, who were granted far-reaching extrajudicial privileges in Trinidad and Tobago. This same group were also instrumental in quelling the revolutionary Black Power movement in the 1970s. Lead by Police Commissioner Randolph Burroughs, the group was disbanded in 1986 following a series of scandals. Many were harmed pursuing 'justice' and 'accountability'.
Though history has shown us otherwise, we still routinely rely on liberal notions of what justice is or even could be. In light of my reckoning with this specific historical reality in Trinidad and Tobago, I ask then how does treating the 'law' as a fiction serving the imperialist death drive ordering the current world? What if legality and morality were recognized as a false equivalency? What can be gained through critical engagement with the law as not neutral and/or natural? What if all we can gain is an interminable sense of loss, of grief, of violence?
The wheel mirrors the process producing these sensations within our charged emotional and logical centres from engaging the state and rule of Law. How much agency do we have in the disruption of that schema? The wheel reveals all its possibilities at once, showing its hand. Yet, we still expect something different, something more.
Fabrication- Patrick Camut
Special thanks to curators Danielle A. Jackson, Ryan Inouye and Liz Park.