A screaming comes across the sky
Drones, mass surveillance and invisible wars
10 October 2014–8 March 2015
LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre
Los Prados 121 – 33394
Gijón (Asturias)
Spain
www.laboralcentrodearte.org
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The international group exhibition A screaming comes across the sky focuses on the shock and awe of drone warfare. The exhibition, and its associated events, explores the increasingly invisible military technologies that have been responsible for the disappearance of growing numbers of civilians in the past decade, in wars that are largely conducted secretly and unaccountably.
Artists have made some of the most urgent examinations of the impact of drone technology in war. The artists in A screaming comes across the sky make plain the contested ecology of networked military space, revealing how it is subject to surveillance, control and manipulation. From Hito Steyerl’s humorous critique of video surveillance, and James Bridle’s incensed investigation of invisibility, to Metahaven’s psychogeology of network technologies, Laurent Grasso’s phenomenology of flight, and Roger Hiorns’s haunting automation sculptures.
Some of the works are poetic by nature, inviting the audience to placidly reflect. Others create a more immediate, visceral response, making them physically experience awe and apprehension. As often in tragedy, humour can be the most fearless messenger.
In the post-PRISM age of mass surveillance, artists join journalists to reveal the technological infrastructures that enable events like drone-strikes to occur. Like journalism, art reveals aspects of our world that have been deliberately concealed from public view. Art provides us with a way of being able to perceive this militarized part of the landscape, and crucially gives us a language to be able to describe it.
Curator: Juha van ‘t Zelfde, Artistic Director Lighthouse
Artists: AeraCoop (Lot Amorós, Cristina Navarro y Alexandre Oliver), Spain / Lot Amorós, Spain / James Bridle, UK / Alicia Framis, Spain / Laurent Grasso, France / Roger Hiorns, UK / Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson (terminal beach) UK/Italy / Metahaven, NL / Mariele Neudecker, Germany / Martha Rosler, USA / Roman Signer, Switzerland / Hito Steyerl, Germany
Initiation of concept and collaboration: Honor Harger
Exhibition architecture: Miroslav Rajic
Exhibition graphics: Metahaven
With thanks to: All of the artists involved and courtesy of Open Data Institute, Laurent Grasso Studio, Edouard Malingue Gallery (Hong Kong), ADAGP Gallery (Paris), Corvi-Mora Gallery, UK, Gallerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Martha Rosler Studio & Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Gallerie Martin Janda, Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam
LABoral is a multidisciplinary institution which produces, disseminates and fosters access to new forms of culture rooted in the creative use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Its transversal, integrated programming is targeted at a wide public base with the ultimate goal of generating and sharing knowledge.
