Opening Reception
Friday May 13th
8:00 pm
Or Gallery
The Or Gall ery is pleased to present Security Theatre\, an exhibition featuri ng works by Karl Burke\, Harun Farocki\, An-My Lê and the Bureau of Inverse Technology.
Security Theatre revolves around methods of sim ulation and documentation and their hold on respective truth claims about m odern war. Specifically\, this exhibition looks at how modern warfare is ra tionalised\, remembered and portrayed across image based media such as elec tronic games\, video and photography. The exhibition examines how these sys tems manifest and evolve into the 21st century\, which sees war increasingl y fought by proxy and through remote digital means. While claims of possess ing the humanist high ground remain tied to the Western Bloc\, they are no longer linked to the policy of deterrence seen in the 20th century\, but in stead are tied to myths of precision and expedience in a preemptive first s trike context. Just as there were efforts in the 20th century to socialise people to the omnipresent threats of nuclearism\, so too is there an effort to socialise people to the endless need for conflict underwritten by the u biquitous threat of terrorist states and actors. This requires the creation of dissociative mental states. While the past mass dissociation of the Col d War addressed the need to prevent nuclear war by preparing for it\, today ’s dissociation follows the need to prevent terrorism by engaging in it. Th e technology used and the social conditions required were developed increme ntally with the aid of experts in various fields\, with the aim of gaining either tacit or explicit endorsement of so-called “security policies” which are largely maintained through obfuscation and manipulation. The artists i ncluded use media and techniques that provide an intrinsic sense of objecti ve documentation when making reference to armed conflict and related events \, which interpret and manage expectations of modern war.
The Bureau of Inverse Technology
The Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT
) began as a collective of anonymous artists working at the intersection of
art and technology. Though their work is publicly available\, not much is
known about the artists themselves. Formed in either 1991 or 1992 (reports
vary)\, BIT is based in at least three locations:
Melbourne\, San Francisco and Berlin. BIT’s arti
st-engineers are involved in design\, deployment and documentation of produ
cts based on commercially available electronic components such as cameras\,
radios\, networks\, robots\, sensors\, etc. Their stated aim is to be an i
nformation agency servicing the Information Age. In 2004 information was re
leased about the founding members: engineer/theorist Natalie Jeremijenko an
d radio journalist Kate Rich\, in addition to artist Daniela Tigani. The an
onymity of the Bureau was in part a strategy to reflect on the anonymity of
technical production – the diffused accountability and ethnographic anonym
ity in which information technologies and software are generally produced.
BIT works with information technology as its prim
ary material\, re-engineering technical systems to address the hidden polit
ics of technology. BIT questions the safety of th
e corporate imagination and its design upon our technological futures and r
aises questions of privacy in an increasingly technological world. It prese
nts chilling possibilities of a future reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel
1984\, in which unsettling\, voyeuristic ways of applying readily
available technology erode privacy. Its media products include economic in
dices\, consumer-level network and visualisation devices\, as well as video
s\, sound works\, and specialised installations.
Karl Burke
Karl Burke (b.1969) is an Irish photographer living and workin
g in Dublin\, Ireland. His interest in photography started in 1987 while st
udying at Trinity College Dublin\, from which he graduated in 1990 with a B
achelor’s Degree in Law. After completing his professional qualifications i
n 1993 he became a full-time musician in an alternative rock band. He trave
lled to Berlin and lived there between 1994 and 1995\, concentrating on pai
nting. Returning to Ireland he then practiced as a lawyer for several years
\, finally leaving the legal profession in 2002 to set up a studio writing
music for film\, television and commercials. Burke departed the studio in 2
008 to return to photography on a full-time basis. He won the Grand Prix pr
ize at Fotofestiwal Łódź in 2013 for his project The Harvest of Death v
2.0. His work has been exhibited in Ireland\, Germany\, Poland\, Lithu
ania\, Argentina and the USA and has been publish
ed by The Washington Post\; Diário Económico\; The Sunday Times\; The I
rish Times\; The British Journal of Photography\; Lens\, the photojour
nalism blog of The New York Times\; and others. His work aims to e
xplore the underlying threads connecting science\, the self\, and notions o
f reality\, with a particular interest in the impact of technology on human
behaviour.
Harun Farocki
The German film direc
tor\, screenwriter and media artist Harun Farocki was born in 1944 to an In
dian father and a German mother\, in Nazi controlled Czechoslovakia. Farock
i studied Theatre\, Sociology and Journalism in West Berlin in the 1960s. I
nfluenced by Jean-Luc Godard and Bertolt Brecht\, Farocki gradually develop
ed his unique style of non-narrative filmmaking concerned with understandin
g\, reflecting and confronting modern society. Since 1966 Farocki produced\
, wrote and directed more than 100 short and feature-length films for telev
ision and cinema\, mostly documentaries and essay films that analyzed socia
l realities with a precise use of moving images\, and always included the p
olitical and sociological context involved in the creation of imagery. Sinc
e 1996 Farocki had numerous group and solo exhibitions in museums and galle
ries worldwide\, including New York\, Vienna and Paris\, followed by retros
pectives of his films in London and Warsaw. Farocki’s participation in the
prestigious documenta in 1997 and 2007 is an indication of the huge impact
that his films and video installations have had in the art context and in t
he film world: six of his films were presented in the “Forum” of the Berlin
International Film Festival and two more films won awards at the Locarno I
nternational Film Festival in 2003 and 2007. In 2009 the influential French
magazine Cahiers du cinéma named Farocki’s and Andrei Ujica’s celebrated m
asterpiece Videogramme einer Revolution (1992) one of the 10 most subversiv
e films ever made. Farocki’s life included writing about film and teaching
media. As a teacher Farocki had a significant cinematic and intellectual in
fluence on the development of the acclaimed “Berlin School” film movement.
He co-wrote five celebrated feature films with its most prominent member Ch
ristian Petzold\, who used to be his student and assistant. Harun Farocki d
ied at the age of 70 in July 2014 in his home near Berlin.
An
-My Lê
An-My Lê’s photographs of landscapes transformed by wa
r or other forms of military activity blur the boundaries between fact and
fiction and are rich with layers of meaning. Born in Saigon in 1960\, she c
ame to the United States in 1975 as a political refugee. Much of Lê’s work
is inspired by her own experience of war and dislocation. From black and wh
ite images of her native Vietnam taken on various return visits in 1994 to
pictures of Vietnam War battle re-enactments in rural America\, her photogr
aphs straddle the documentary and the conceptual\, creating a neutral persp
ective that brings the essential ambiguity of the medium to the fore. In he
r series 29 Palms (2003–2004)\, Lê documents American soldiers tra
ining in a desert in Southern California before their deployment to Iraq. S
he focuses her camera alternately on young recruits and the harsh terrain i
n which they practice their drills\, lending an obvious artificiality to th
e photographs that invites speculation about the romance and myth of contem
porary warfare. Currently\, Lê is documenting the U.S. military’s presence
at sites around the world where personnel are undertaking training missions
\, patrolling international waterways\, and offering humanitarian aid. An a
dditional series in progress explores the ongoing ties between Vietnamese n
ationals who have migrated to southern Louisiana over the past twenty-five
years and their homeland in the Mekong Delta.
An-My Lê received B.A.S.
(1981) and M.S. (1985) degrees from Stanford University and an M.F.A. (199
3) from Yale University. Since 1998\, she has been affiliated with Bard Col
lege\, where she is currently a professor in the Department of Photography.
Her work has been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art\, N
ew York\; MoMA PS1\, New York\; The Art Institute of Chicago\; the Metropol
itan Museum of Art\, New York\; Dia: Beacon\; the Museum of Contemporary Ph
otography\, Chicago\; TATE Modern\, London\; the
Museum of Fine Arts\, Houston\; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art\
, among many others. In 2012\, Lê was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. Ma
cArthur Foundation Fellowship in recognition of her accomplishments as a ph
otographer and her contributions to the evolution of the medium. Recently s
he has had major survey shows at the Baltimore Museum of Art\; MK Gallery\,
UK\; MAS I Museum aan de Stroom\, Antwerp\; and
Hasselblad Center\, Sweden.
This exhibition is a collaboration betwee n the Critical and Curatorial Studies Program at the University of British Columbia and the Or Gallery. This project is made possible with the support from the Killy Foundation and the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies through the Department of Art History\, Visual Art and Theory in collaborat ion with the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of Briti sh Columbia. Special thanks to Justin Barski’s faculty advisors\, Jaleh Mansoor \, John O’ Brian and Scott Watson as well as the Video Data Bank for their support.
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