ON PATROL
De Appel Centre for Contemporary Art Amsterdam
29 Jan - 20 Mar 2005
ON PATROL examines the many different systems that police our society, from traditional investigatory techniques to the invisible practices of gathering and classifying (personal) data that have become a form of social control. In the exhibition artists, reflecting on the public domain, show how their work relates to the panoptical surveillance society.
The artists invited for the exhibition ON PATROL explore with various aspects of (in)security: they play with the observations of other people, manipulate techniques of espionage, hack, break codes and appropriate methods of power. They reveal the fear of insecurity as well as the worries about an excess of security. ON PATROL is a response on the ongoing debate about security measures and the new cultural offensive being waged by the government. Critical and artistic confrontations with policing and surveillance are deployed in order to make us ask ourselves: what is acceptable in the name of security? When is our individual freedom so much at stake that a boundary has to be transgressed and whose interests are served by capitalising on or fuelling fear?
The exhibition ON PATROL will be officially opened on Friday 28 January at 7.30 p.m. by Boris Dittrich, chairman of the D66 Parliamentary party.
Artists:
Marc Bijl
Sophie Calle
Ergin Çavusoglu
Paul Chan
Cláudia Cristóvão
Harun Farocki
Robin van´t Haar
Nicoline van Harskamp
Janice Kerbel
Jill Magid
Yucef Merhi
Julia Scher
socialfiction.org
Deborah Stratman
www.deappel.nl
