You’ll Know It

When You Feel It

Raphaela ‘Rosie’ Rosella

with Dayannah Baker Barlow, Kathleen ‘Rowrow’ Duncan,

Gillianne Laurie, Tammara Macrokanis, Amelia ‘Mimi’ Rosella,

Nunjul Townsend, Laurinda Whitton, Tricia Whitton, and family.

Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

20 May–19 August 2023

Every history of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern, and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspectives matter, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor.

—Saidiya Hartman

The prison-industrial complex does not only encompass policing and courtrooms, prisons, and probation, it is also embedded in archival practices. Bureaucratic procedures and documents have the power to punish and reinforce existing power structures that silence certain voices. The right to speak, particularly as an incarcerated individual, relies on the type of story you can contribute.[1]

You’ll Know It When You Feel It is an exhibition-installation drawn from a co-created archive that traces the inter-connected experiences of socially engaged artist Raphaela Rosella, her family, and friends, and the complex impacts of carceral systems. Growing up in Nimbin on Bundjalung Country, Rosella saw firsthand how her community was frequently surveilled, arrested, court-sanctioned, separated from informal support systems, and ultimately (and increasingly) imprisoned. As Rosella puts it:

rather than meet the immediate needs of our community such as providing access to safe and affordable housing, secure employment, quality education, accessible and holistic healthcare, and adequate welfare support, the state punishes us for engaging in underground economies to survive.

You’ll Know It When You Feel It draws from a co-created archive of imagery, recordings, documents, and ephemera produced and collected over a fifteen-year period, with contributions from several women and families living in various states of un/freedom, across Nimbin, Lismore, Casino, and Moree. From large-scale wallpapers made from redacted documents that reveal the ineptitude of ‘official’ records to bittersweet family albums that preserve time and memories for loved ones who have been denied the right to intimacy, You’ll Know It When You Feel It explores the value of co-created archives as a site of resistance.

Rosella acknowledges the tensions that lie within the collaboration at the heart of this project. These arise through her own privileges: of race, higher education, and community support (she has no firsthand experience of being imprisoned), as well as through the extractive conditions inherent to the medium of photography, and the ambivalent position of the gallery as a Eurocentric structure that can be operationalised to both enforce or resist the settler colonial project. As Rosella states,  

the relentless imprisonment of several co-creators, often means that our relational exchanges are heavily restricted. Yet, at the end of the day, I can enter and leave these punitive settings as a ‘visitor’, whereas my loved one’s who are incarcerated ‘must return to enclosed boxes as criminalised and punished subjects’.[2]

Nonetheless, this archive still shares vital insight into the emotional landscape of what lies beneath the violence enacted by the prison-industrial complex. While we see these documents articulated as an exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art, they have also been part of family albums and memorial services, custody disputes and court cases, resulting in reduced custodial sentences and successful bail and parole applications. Counter-archival practices can be deployed to serve community, memory, and in action against state narratives and records that see intimate lives reduced to pages of paperwork. 

You’ll Know It When You Feel It and the public program led by Sisters Inside that accompanies it remind us that abolition is a collective creative act that contemporary art has a unique position to help envision. Abolition means not just the closing of prisons. It requires abolishing the culture of power and punishment that permeate our daily lives, our arts practices, our workplaces, and our cultural institutions. It is a project of creating a more just, equitable, and compassionate world that is rooted in principles of care and collective liberation. As abolitionist, scholar, and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “Freedom is a place”[3]—you’ll know it when you feel it.

[1] Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy, “Speaking Out for Criminalised Women” The Saturday Paper, 2020,

[2] Nicole R Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Harvard University Press, 2020, p. 189.

[3] Rachel Kushner, ‘Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind’, New York Times Magazine, 17 April 2019,