Walls, Windows, and Blood is a body of work by Catherine Opie that examines the Vatican as both architecture and ideology. Through large-scale vertical panoramas of the city-state’s fortified walls, the project reflects on how the Catholic Church reinforces its authority and permanence through spatial and representational means. The walls, depicted in grainy black and white, shift between inward and outward inflections—capturing both the passage of time and the surveillance infrastructures embedded within their mass.

For the exhibition, Now Here designed a series of marble plinths that support these monumental images. Configured as provisional “art blocks,” the plinths can be rotated to mirror the inflection of the photographed walls, pressing inward or outward into the gallery. Their instability forces the walls to lean rather than stand, undermining the sense of permanence and control the Vatican seeks to project. The choice of pink, fleshy marble recalls the Baroque tradition of stone as a surrogate for the human body, here repositioned to question the body-politic of religious power.

Through this pairing of image and support, the installation both stages and unsettles the authority of one of the world’s most enduring institutions, exposing its mechanisms of representation, control, and endurance.