Facing Surveillance: Artistic and Curatorial Strategies in Times of Control

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how contemporary art exhibitions in Europe between 2013–2023 have mobilised surveillance critiques in visual, affective, and medium-specific ways. The work examines the motifs and strategies that artists and curators have employed to accomplish this mobilisation. It presents a corpus of key exhibitions that are emblematic of prevalent curatorial developments and that hitherto have not been recognised for their ability to foster critical public awareness of surveillance. While exhibitions are the most important context in which surveillance art is encountered by publics, this important interface between art and public has, thus far, received little attention in scholarly research. The dissertation demonstrates the crucial role exhibitions play in the ways in which surveillance art is experienced and made sense of. Furthermore, it identifies curators as important agents in mediating complex, abstract, scholarly surveillance critiques to non-expert publics. Through this in situ approach to surveillance art, I show how exhibitions can mobilise affective encounters between visitors and artworks that foster a visceral and embodied engagement with surveillance critique.

To investigate the visual, affective, and medium-specific ways in which exhibitions contest and reimagine surveillance, this study develops new connections and previously unexplored synergies between the scholarly fields of surveillance studies, and in particular feminist surveillance studies, curatorial studies, and theories of art and affect. Via this approach, I identify three prominent curatorial motifs—visuality, faces, and algorithms and AI—through which curators have brought surveillance to the attention of the wider public. Drawing on dispositif and narrative analysis, I investigate a corpus of key exhibitions to demonstrate how these motifs shed critical light on different aspects of surveillance. Furthermore, I draw upon semiotics to investigate how surveillance critiques are conceptualised, visualised, and made tangible at the level of artworks. Additionally, I employ methods of research-creation to develop a practice-based approach to curation, which allows me not only to conduct research about curation, but also through it.

The dissertation contributes novel insights to the fields curatorial studies and surveillance studies, not only by attending to the question of how contemporary art exhibitions can mobilise processes of meaningmaking and reflection on surveillance, but also by providing an in-depth and theoretical analysis of the specific critiques that are provoked through the curatorial mediation of surveillance art. As I argue in the concluding chapter, the exhibitions that have been analysed foster understandings of surveillance as a “complex of visuality” (Mirzoeff 2011), a process of “informatic capture” (Blas and Gaboury 2016), and a process of algorithmic classification. These conceptualisations reveal how surveillance is not a neutral and merely technical phenomenon, but rather a political issue of social sorting. Not only do such exhibitions communicate expert knowledge to broader publics, but they also hold the capacity to mediate these insights in medium-specific, affective, and visual ways to stimulate sensing as well as sense-making. Accordingly, I argue that exhibitions can construct affective encounters between visitors, artworks, and socio-political issues that foster public reflection and debate on surveillance.