Vandalism Dossier

Vandalism Dossier answers the language of violence that seeps into everyday life with a response from the body. Its starting point is a mix of admiration and anger toward Eliza Bennett’s practice that turns handiwork into a scar.

In the video, the artist stitches the slur “sürtük” into her palm with red thread, returning a derogatory rhetoric of power to the body. The stitch reads as a gesture that both opens and sutures. Close-ups follow the resistance of skin and the friction of thread; the edit and sound design build a rhythm of repetition and tension.

The work exposes political control over the female body, the hardening of public speech in times of crisis, and the mark such speech leaves on personal experience. Here “vandalism” is not destruction but the act of cutting and rewriting speech; the “dossier” is a record kept on flesh. The piece seeks to neutralize the insult without owning it, transforming it into testimony and resistance.