Contemporary forms of surveillance continue to bleed into our mundane actions and reactions in the form of internalized and external forms of presence and awareness. How does art and design, in the form of urban iterations, respond to the notion of social surveillance? No Linguistic Content on view at 221A attempts to address this question through new works by Antonia Hirsch, Gabriel Mindel-Saloman, and Luke Munn. Spanning Vancouver and Berlin, these three artists hold practices that range greatly in their approach to understanding power and systems, but are all rooted here in their gesture toward the ephemeral.
Antonia Hirsch, Intravert, 2014 (photo: Dennis Ha)
Featuring everything from balloons to bunting, the exhibition on paper has a heavy heart, but in its lived space, is anything but. Facing the street is the mirrored storefront window space by Antonia Hirsch. Intravert is simply an application of a mirrored surface often used by store keepers to shield interior spaces while still letting in natural light. With the connotation of also being a window dressing for socially undesirable businesses, its use for an artist run centre in Chinatown is both natural and amusing.
Once inside the gallery, Intravert becomes a spatial intervention, partly demarcating the space through two angular lines, but also remaining quite inviting in its flowing sheen of light. Other works include a banner by Munn featuring thousands of emails reduced to patterned data, as well as Saloman's collages of "people who have been surveilled by the police or the state invited to take a photo that reveals nothing about themselves," a seemingly self-explanatory work from its title.
The exhibition title is taken from a Library of Congress classification code, ZXX, which stands for "no linguistic content; not applicable." Texts and publications that elude classification fall into this category of non-signification. This clearly inspired exhibition curator Bopha Chhay to take fair aim at the codes and convention of contemporary surveillance through a playful embodiment of spatial awareness.
221A: http://221a.ca
No Linguistic Content continues until March 21.
Amy Fung is a writer and organizer who publishes nationally and internationally in journals, magazines, catalogues, and monographs in print and online. She is the Programs Manager at Cineworks Independent Filmmakers Society and her ongoings can be found at POSTpacificPOST.com and on Twitter @anotheramyfung. She is Akimblog's Vancouver correspondent.
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No Linguistic Content at 221a
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