Surveillance.02 presents works by interdisciplinary artists whose practices incorporate camera, satellite, and drone to question corporate and state surveillance, and energy production. Fueled by curiosity, anger, and humor, they are grappling with the human side of the global war on terror, exposing humanity’s permanent wounding of the environment, and engaging with state systems of power and control. At the center of the tensions and anxieties they pursue are the tangles of convenience and privacy, individual and type, freedom and security.
Featured artists are: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Edmund Clark, Massimo Berruti, Jenny Odell, Yann Mingard, Tomas van Houtryve, Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon.
The show is the second in the ongoing Surveillance series that I curate with Liza Faktor, both of us based in New York. We initiated it in April 2014 with Surveillance.01-USA at the Made In NY Media Center in New York.
Surveillance as a topic is a fugitive one – opaque, jargon-ridden, and by nature, elusive and virtual. While there is a frictionless morality to it, it also precipitates a steady stream of social, political, and environmental crises and anxieties. We wanted to understand it better for ourselves and bring people into the conversations around it so that its meaning was not just for policy and security experts.
The beauty, elegance, and weirdness of the imagery in this show arise from a particular curiosity driving the artists. We love that real people make this art, and that they are placing themselves quietly but directly on the chessboard of geopolitics, national security, the Internet’s intrusive dominance, Google’s all-seeing nine eyes, the fluid notion of privacy. They are trying to draw coherence out of what is physically and ethically invisible and remote. If there is joy in this exhibition, it stems from their scrutiny of systems of power and control, whatever the brand face of flag attached.
The timing for Surveillance.02 is exciting too because it coincides with the opening week of Art Dubai, the leading international art fair in the Middle East. Over the course of East Wing’s three-year existence, Director Elie Domit and founder Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani have been indefatigable in their drive to cultivate and exhibit innovative, lens-based media from all over the world in the UAE. Surveillance.02 will be the first time an exhibit tackling this subject has been seen in the UAE.
A new work by Edmund Clark is just one of the surprises to be found in Surveillance.02. Dulce et Decorum Est: Virtue Unmann‘d is a video installation that explores traditions of virtue and sacrifice in the context of drone strikes on tribal areas of Pakistan.
An added feature is the screening of Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon’s film World Brain, which will be shown on 24 March. World Brain is both film and an essay. It takes the viewer through a journey inside the physical places by which the Internet transits: submarine cables, data centers, and satellites. The screening will give audiences another entry point into the topics raised by this exhibition.
https://vimeo.com/117731172
Anna Van Lenten is a curator, editor, and literary fiction writer whose projects involve both images and text. As curator of the bi-monthly Half King Photography Series in New York City, she exhibits some of the best documentary photographers working today. Over the past five years, she has put on more than thirty shows, adding context via writings, audio, and each show’s opening night discussion with the photographer in public. The far-ranging scope of her exhibits include Becoming Chinese, by Carolyn Drake; Water of My Land, by Samuel James; Chasing Lawrence in Arabia, by Lowell Thomas; Sami: The People Who Walk With Reindeer, by Erika Larsen; Sandhogs, by Gina LeVay; and The Dry Land, by Matt Black.
Liza Faktor is a visual documentary producer, curator and co-founder of Screen. She was founding director of The Objective Reality Foundation in Russia and co-founder and director of Agency.Photographer.ru. Her curatorial practice has involved projects such as; Streaming Nation (IDFA DocLab, 2014), the 4th and 5th Photoqual Biennale, Paris (2013 & 2015), Stories of Life: the best of multimedia journalism (2013), Projections of Reality (2010), Affects Me. Affects Everyone, an art project on HIV/AIDS (2016) among others. Liza is the recipient of the Howard Chapnick award in picture editing and has served on juries worldwide, including the World Press Photo multimedia jury (2014).
EXHIBITION
Surveillance.02
From March 13th to April 30th, 2015
The screening of World Brain is on Tuesday 24 March at 19:00
East Wing
12 Limestone House, Ritz Carlton Annex
Dubai International Financial Centre, Dubai
UAE
Phone +971 50 553 3879
[email protected]
Gallery hours are: Saturday – Thursday, 10AM – 3pm & 5pm – 8pm.
