Facing Surveillance
Authors:   , Wevers Rosa Lise Leu 
Published: June 2024

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.