Corpus Delicti

In the early 1990s, Jac Leirner collected objects from her many airplane trips, including napkins, cutlery, baggage tags, boarding passes, ear plugs, and ashtrays. She then ordered these objects into a series of works called "Corpus Delicti," a legal term in Latin meaning the concrete evidence of a crime. This string of connected objects functions as a travelogue of Leirner’s journeys. It also documents her struggle to quit smoking and her obsessive and sometimes illegal acquisition of materials, as in the case of the ashtrays and cutlery. For Leirner, the works “convey a history, with the idea of transgression imprinted on them.” They are removed from one circuit and are consecrated by another, changing from airplane accoutrements to works of art.