In her new project Double Jeopardy, the artist Carmen Winant mines the archives for images that illuminate women’s efforts and lived experiences. This presentation marks Winant’s first exploration of video as a medium and historical subject matter, shifting her focus from the still imagery of the photograph to the moving image. Winant draws from videotapes found in the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence’s (NCADV) archive, materials from Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and documents from the personal archive of activist Yolanda Bako. The exhibition—conceived for both the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College and the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery at Harvard Radcliffe Institute—examines the early formation of the global movement against domestic violence during the 1970s and ’80s: a period when feminist organizing, survivor advocacy, and new technology converged under urgent political and social pressures.

With a practice anchored in archival research and the reimagination of feminist material histories, Winant is celebrated for large-scale collage installations and artist’s books that recontextualize existing photographic imagery. In Double Jeopardy, she extends her inquiry to video by digitizing and applying her collagist strategies to more than 200 cassettes held in NCADV storage—footage that has been unseen for decades.

The resulting artworks—a vast array of video-still portraits and three videos, respectively, of women’s groups, men’s groups, and audiences listening to accounts of trauma and recovery—form the core of Double Jeopardy. They highlight the simultaneous emergence of the anti-domestic violence movement and of video as a DIY medium crucial to supporting the grassroots efforts of the movement itself.

Complementing the portraits and the video content are framed collages of documents from Yolanda Bako’s and the Schlesinger Library’s archives, paired with short texts from interviews conducted by the artist. These intimate works offer a singular narrative of one woman’s life in the movement.

Double Jeopardy realizes the second chapter of Winant’s work with NCADV holdings, following a project in 2022. Consistent with her work in archives across her practice, the artist approaches such materials not as historical artifacts to be stabilized, but material to be enriched. The exhibition does not offer closure or resolution. Instead, it proposes a constellation of images and voices that make visible the often unacknowledged work of survivors and advocates that laid the foundation for ongoing struggles toward safety, justice, and autonomy.

Double Jeopardy, curated by Anne Thompson, director and curator of Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, has traveled to the Institute where Winant conducted research at the Schlesinger Library. Framed as a site for sharing knowledge and experience, the exhibition at the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery is organized by Meg Rotzel, curator of exhibitions at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.