Exhibits
The Modular Exhibit Framework
The Wrong Questions Project's signature framework is a modular system of exhibits that can be installed individually, in combination, or as a fully integrated installation. Each module begins with a victim-blaming question and traces how that question functions to blame survivors and enable violence.
The exhibits are not illustrations or artistic interpretations. They are documentation. The clothing, words, objects, statistics, case records, audio, video, testimony, and family witness are part of the evidence. They are placed together so that what has been normalized, minimized, laundered, and administratively absorbed can be seen clearly.
What Were You Wearing?
The Role of Victim-Blaming & Indifference in Facilitating & Perpetuating Gender-Based Crimes
This module confronts how victim-blaming questions treat clothing as explanation for sexual violence. The question redirects scrutiny from perpetrator to victim, making the person harmed answer for violence they did not cause.
Why Didn't She Just Leave?
Coercive Control through Language
This module dismantles the question that treats leaving as a simple decision. It documents the violence that makes leaving dangerous: coercive control, stalking, threats, surveillance, and institutional failures that leave women unprotected.
Why Didn't You Just Tell Someone?
Silencing Children
This module examines how the question fails children by treating silence as the problem rather than examining adults, institutions, and systems that failed to listen, recognize, investigate, intervene, or protect.
Why We Use Our Names
We name deliberately, because the shame was never ours to carry. The fear has always been that a name dilutes the work—that anonymity is what lets a stranger see herself reflected back in an anonymized outfit on the wall. But naming does not narrow it. The name is what makes it possible to say: you are not alone in this.
Through the exhibits and podcasts, we give survivors back their names, voices, and stories. The original installations made the deliberate choice to keep survivors unnamed. We make the opposite, deliberate choice to name survivors and family-led witness as acts of reclamation and moral repair.
How the Framework Functions
When modules are installed together, they amplify one another and reveal the shared machinery: grooming, coercion, silencing, disbelief, institutional failure, credibility policing, victim-blaming, record-management, and the normalization of harm.
Once these patterns become visible in one setting, they become visible everywhere: in police reports, clergy files, hospitals, schools, family courts, custody decisions, media narratives, and the boardrooms where institutions decide whose accounts will be believed and whose will not.
"We use the clothing to take the question apart, not to give it a stage."Read the Full Curatorial Ethics Statement
Content Warning
These exhibit storyboards focus on the lived experiences of survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, as well as those who did not survive. They contain depictions and descriptions of sexual abuse, rape, and domestic violence, including assaults involving minors and the murder of women and children. The materials include representations of clothing worn during assaults, survivor testimony, and direct language about violent and traumatic experiences.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE. SUPPORT IS AVAILABLE.
Intellectual Property Notice & Lineage Framework
The What Were You Wearing? exhibition concept and framework originate entirely in the poem "What I Was Wearing," written by Dr. Mary Simmerling in the early 2000s and formally registered with the United States Copyright Office on March 11, 2005 (Registration No. TXu001227936).
The physical installation model—pairing representative everyday survivor clothing with documented evidence—was established at the University of Arkansas in 2014 by Jen Brockman and Dr. Mary A. Wyandt-Hiebert, directly inspired by and rooted in this foundational poem. This specific curatorial methodology belongs strictly to the grassroots lineage of this movement.
The utilization of this framework, title, or concept for commercial events, luxury spectacles, or corporate-sponsored productions without formal licensing and proper historical attribution constitutes a direct violation of registered copyright and curatorial ethics.
Virtual Exhibit: Documentary Video
In collaboration with Write Where We Belong
Gallery: Representative Exhibit Boards
