DISSONANCE

Jordan Strafer creates disquieting scenarios in which intimacy intersects with spectacle, and attraction collides with repulsion, exposing the artifices by which power and representation shape social reality and influence public opinion. Spanning video, installation, sculpture, and drawing, her work combines personal and fictional narratives with historical documents and the visual languages of cinema and television.

The exhibition at Fluentum is an extension of her ongoing film series Loophole (since 2023) whose first two chapters LOOPHOLE (2023) and DECADENCE (2024) are presented as a continuous edit. They are expanded through sculptural and architectural interventions, alongside a newly commissioned film, DISSONANCE (2025).

Loophole centers on a fictionalised high-profile rape trial in 1990s Florida and its immediate aftermath. A clandestine affair between the defense attorney Ray and juror Lisa becomes the story’s central “loophole,” a metaphor for the ways desire, seduction, and complicity destabilize the courtroom. Rather than framing justice as an ideal that is simply corrupted, Strafer highlights the futility of the system itself. Trials, especially those involving sexual violence, are never neutral spaces. They are structured by patriarchal violence and by the very language through which “facts” are presented. Here, the trial appears less as a search for truth than as a performance in which roles are acted out and outcomes already written. The affair operates ambivalently, at once making clear that justice for victims is unattainable while unsettling the very codes through which judgment is staged.

For DISSONANCE, Jordan Strafer has created a site-specific installation resembling another kind of televised tribunal: a 1990s talk show studio situated in the afterlife, whose backlog of cases goes back to the late 1940s. This studio served as the set for the eponymous film, shot in front of a live audience during the opening and featuring renowned film and theater actor Jim Fletcher, who plays Ray in Loophole. In DISSONANCE (2025), he returns as an American World War II soldier and self-help guru who guides viewers through a meditative journey.

From October 24, 2025, DISSONANCE (2025) will be added to the exhibition display, accompanied by a public program that offers further insights into Jordan Strafer’s practice and includes a screening in collaboration with the Allied Museum in Berlin of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), an afterlife courtroom drama that functions as a key reference for Loophole.