For better and for worse, we live in an age in which we are watched as never before.
Close circuit television cameras, orbiting space satellites, mobile phone monitoring and email intercepts. Inevitably, in a world in which that person on the next table with a smart phone might be sending a text message or taking your photograph, these are issues that are both a concern and a subject for artists.
Surveillance. 02 is a new exhibition opening this month at the East Wing gallery at Dubai International Finance Centre that examines the nature of surveillance to comment on the extent of state and corporate power.
The artists include Massimo Berruti, whose photographs from North Waziristan are portraits of people who have been injured or lost family members in drone attacks that have become part of the “War on Terror.” For their portraits, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin use a facial recognition camera developed in Russia for border control and public security. Taking multiple images using four lenses, the camera can create a seamless single face, usually without the subject being aware.
Jenny Odell’s Land Marks manipulates satellite images to remove any signs of nature from mining and waste storage sites to reveal the full extent of the damage to the environment while war photographer Tomas van Houtryve’s landscapes come from a camera to a drone flown over Middle America, turning the latest surveillance tool into an art form.
Surveillance. 02 opens on March 12 at the East Wing gallery in the Ritz Carlton Annex of DIFC. Admission is free.
