The Brooklyn Rail

The concepts of home and shelter diverge in Carmen Winant’s Double Jeopardy. At the center of Bennington College’s Usdan Gallery stands a purpose-built wooden house, or its frame—raw timber, open roof, visible struts. A skeleton of domestic space, the structure organizes Winant’s first works in video alongside a group of small paper collages made from the personal archive of Yolanda Bako, a domestic violence activist. The video materials are sourced from more than two hundred VHS tapes held in the archive of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), footage unseen for decades that Winant has digitized and arranged into three video assemblages. Each video compiles recordings of distinct “groups”—women survivors, men who perpetrated violence, and audiences—which Double Jeopardy situates in and around the structure. As in much of Winant’s practice, these works are inseparable from archival labor, shepherding material that might otherwise remain dispersed, unpictured, and unseen. But where the grid of images in Double Jeopardy (Women to Camera) (2026) exemplifies Winant’s characteristic use of accumulation across space, the videos’ accumulation of archival media unfolds in time. Experiences pile and repeat. Confessions and reckonings are modulated by voice tremors, nods, surfacing emotions, and in some cases, by performance. The plywood armature turns out to be as much a proposition as a practical setting: home is not always where shelter is found, but the place from which it is sought.

Winant’s placement of works in and around the house spatializes a historical logic. The domestic violence movement of the 1970s and ’80s organized itself around a binary of women who experienced violence and men who committed it, though the movement held far more diversity than this structure suggests. Winant herself works in feminism, not taxonomy, but Double Jeopardy’s installation articulates the movement’s categorical distinctions. Women, men, and audiences were convened into discrete meeting groups for healing, testimony, and accountability.

On one side of the house’s exterior, chairs face a TV monitor mounted on the wooden façade, where videos of what would have been called “battered women’s groups” play. An acrylic filter acting as a pane of frosted glass anonymizes survivors. Sharing experiences and seeking counsel, they challenge and console one another. They tell how they stayed, coped, and eventually left. On the structure’s other three sides, the collages hang—small framed works that pair typed excerpts from Winant’s interviews with Bako and photographs of Bako’s archive. Initially taken by Winant for research, the photographs show not just what Bako kept—protest signs, portraits of other activists, a copy of Rape Victimology—but how. Bako’s labels and folders, framed by Winant’s lens, show the activist’s own investment in organizing and preserving histories. Winant’s collages continue this archival impulse, affixing the physical matter and recounted episodes of Bako’s life onto single planes. There is a gravity to Bako’s stories—an early sexual humiliation fueled by misogyny, a friend’s funeral, and a reflection that she really entered domestic violence work to save her mother from her father. I was four collages in before realizing the accounts all belonged to one woman. For Bako, this onslaught of experiences was transformative, binding her grief and political conviction: “Each little piece of this horror kept on molding me. Each piece cemented my life’s work,” she told Winant and one of the collage’s quotes. Together, on the outside of a home neither inhabits, Bako and the women’s groups form something like solidarity across media. Just inside the home, a second TV monitor displays participants in the men’s groups sharing family histories and internalized cycles of violence. We encounter them, deliberately, inside the threshold. The women, while fixed to the outside of this violent domestic space, direct their gazes beyond it.

The NCADV video archive is hard to categorize. It holds dramatic reenactments alongside real therapy sessions, instructional footage, and corporate training materials, as well as music videos, plays, and movies depicting domestic violence. The movement against domestic violence recognized portable video’s educational potential and used the medium to teach people how to identify and address abuse. Notably, what feels like documentation or testimony might resolve, mid-sentence, into performance—a survivor revealed as someone playing one by a break in character, for example. Recorded testimony became a tool, facilitating efforts to bring the personal to the public. Through video, individual pain was made into collective knowledge by people who understood that surviving and organizing could be a shared act.

The third video work, Double Jeopardy (Audience) (2026) registers these instabilities. Its footage of listeners—drawn from daytime television, news programs, activist meetings, and consciousness-raising groups—is not screened on a TV monitor but projected directly onto one of the house’s interior walls. Opposite the videos of the men’s groups, the audience’s recorded attention is positioned as surveilling. While the other two videos are encountered privately through headphones, on screens that effectively recreate the at-home viewing experience of a confessional talk show, the audience projection is visually and sonically atmospheric. As the plywood wall receives the projected image of their perception, the audience enters the architecture, as if domestic spaces themselves watched, listened, and reacted to domestic violence. Something of psychological projection adheres to the projected video, too. By bringing these archival narratives into the gallery, Winant opens pockets of space for unwanted recognition—realizations that these experiences are ongoing, familiar.

For Double Jeopardy (Women to Camera), Winant installs transparencies—video stills of women testifying on screen—onto the gallery’s windows. The women might be survivors, activists, shelter staff, or journalists; Winant makes no distinction. Light passes through these gathered portraits, onto the groundwork of the house and the stories it bears, and onto the decades of labor in the domestic violence movement collected in this exhibition. Fixed in the moment of their telling, these women chose to contribute private experience to a public cause, to speak for the camera in the hope that someone would be listening. Amid the atmospheric sounds from the audience group video, Women to Camera is a quiet image of what Double Jeopardy does more broadly: it gathers materials kept in the dark and lets light move through them. What becomes visible is not resolution but the situation itself, still in need of witness and intervention.