The photographic venue LE BAL, in Paris, is launching Performing Books. This new format is an initiative of Bal Books, will present every year in January a collection of books by a single artist, researcher or book lover on a specific theme. Discussions, performances, workshops, concerts: by enabling the collection to confront the questions it raises, LE BAL will turn into a research laboratory focussed on books. Here the book’s role as a political gesture is a vehicle for a critical reflection on our society.
The first edition of Performing Books is devoted to Surveillance Index. Compiled by the American Mark Ghuneim, this collection of more than two hundred photography books explores “our golden age of surveillance” and its visible and invisible mechanisms. An expert observer of technological innovation, aware of the challenges of protecting his private life very early on, Ghuneim traces all the lawful and unlawful procedures the State has put in place to observe its citizens. At the beginning of the 1990s, he created an inventory of all the CCTV cameras in New York’s streets and, with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), created an interactive map which allows a person to cross Manhattan without being observed. In 2009, six years before the Snowden affair, Ghuneim started to collect books by artists and photographers on ”those who watch and those who are being watched”: people, machines, institutions, governments, spies, hackers, voyeurs and egotists. At LE BAL, the Surveillance Index collection’s two hundred books will be made available to the public. “The iconography of surveillance is part of our daily lives and has inspired a multitude of artworks”, Mark Ghuneim explains.
In the spirit of a genuine “artistic whistle blower”, Ghuneim is raising the alarm, using this collection and the plethora of visual material as a wake-up call raising awareness and resistance. Which personal and collective civil liberties are we sacrificing on the altar of security? How do our personal, intimate, identifying desires create the tools to control us? What are the political, social, cultural and legal consequences? What behaviour can we adopt in order to disappear from the CCTV screens and meta-databases?
Every day for three weeks a series of events, discussions by sociologists, activists, artists, thinkers and journalists will be part of the programme at LE BAL with the intention of stimulating public debate (cryptoparty with professional hackers, workshop with the photographer Mishka Henner [20/01], concert by Scorpion Violente [20/01], and more.
Surveillance Index: Performing Books #1
From 10th to 27th January 2018
Le Bal
6 Impasse de la Défense
75018 Paris
France
Information and programme: www.le-bal.fr
