Qedesha is a rhizomatic flowchart of the infamous Eastern European Jewish prostitution cartel, Zwi Migdal (1889 -1930). It was exhibited first in the group exhibition Guilty, guilty, guilty! Towards a Feminist Criminology Curated by Sonja Lau for the Kunstraum Kreuzberg. November 12, 2022 – February 19, 2023

The Zwi Migdal prostitution cartel established centers in Warsaw, Buenos Aires, and New York in 1904. By the 1920s, they controlled thousands of brothels in Argentina and hundreds in Brazil. The Zwi Migdal ring was disbanded, however, in the 1930s, after Argentina’s police began to harass them and the Brazilians closed their borders to suspicious-looking women and their “protectors.” The archives of this criminal group were kept in the community record, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) of Buenos Aires, but were destroyed when the AMIA building was blown up by a terrorist attack in 1994.

 Guilty, guilty, guilty! Towards a Feminist Criminology undertakes a feminist assessment of jurisdictional power. The focus is on “women on trial”—female artists, “bad mothers,” women defendants, and women plaintiffs on a rather lost cause. In this context, the courtroom does not only appear as a site of legal assessment, but primarily as a space in which a political or ideological image of women is always implicitly negotiated and constructed. What else, beyond the juridical paragraphs, is debated here? And how can we render this hidden discourse visible?