Insight/Insite:
3 Contemporary Artist in the Age of the Internet



A Micro Exhibition

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Curated By Emeka Ikebude

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CURATORIAL STATEMENT

This online micro-exhibition is a precursor to a bigger, upcoming art exhibition. The objective is to takes a cursory look at how digital technologies have impacted artistic practices in the age of new media technologies. It is a case-study of three artists. All the featured artists in this micro-exhibition namely Hassan Elahi, El Anatsui, and Ann Loveless, live in different geographies and use different kinds of digital media in different ways in their practice, and all of them have been radically impacted by these technologies through how they make, perceive of, and disseminate their art, enabling them to produce powerfully-intuitive body of work that offer new vistas for conceptualizing art, community, identity, and surveillance. Their work, thus, locate on the node of digital culture and artistic practice. At the heart of this exhibition is a quest for knowing what kinds of work the artists are producing, the kinds of technologies they are using to produce them, and how the works are helping deepen our knowledge of the technologies used. It is essential to know what kinds of knowledge and meanings that can be produced by encountering the works, and, in the case of Hassan Elahi, how does his work enable us understand surveillance beyond the Orwellian Big Brother or Foucauldian Panopticon? While the artists use digital media to certain extents, works by El Anatsui shows why it can be misleading to conflate technology with digital, and he uses mainly simple hand tools that keep reminding that even in the digital age, when the notion of technology has been misleadingly tied to the digital, technology can still be understood in terms of ‘original technicity’ and that at no time in history was human really divorced from technology. But we need intuition as mode of access to this domain, because intuition is the only thing that allows us to re-inhabit and reconnect with the fact we are inseparable from technology.

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INTRODUCTION

Technologies are continuously evolving, and so are the problems that contemporary artists are trying to solve with their practice. It was Marshall McLuhan who said that “the conscious role of the artist is to explore and create awareness of the  new environment created by new technologies.” Throughout history, artists had used technology in heir work, as demonstrated by the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and on other surfaces that primitive humans had found expedient to express their world and ideas. Since the internet democratization  thirty years ago, artists have intuitively employed digital media, and it is the work of intuition to guide humanity back to ‘original technicity’ (Manovich, 2007) as humans had never really been divorced from technology.

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ARTIST PROFILE

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HASAN M ELAHI

Hasan M. Elahi is currently an Associate professor of Art at University of Maryland, and Director of the Digital Cultures and Creativity Honors program. He is a transdisciplinary artist whose work examine issues of surveillance, citizenship, immigration, transport and borders and frontiers. His work have been shown in prestigious venues such as SITE Santa Fe, the Center Pompidou, and Venice Biennale. In June of 2002, the US Customs and Immigrations Services at the Detroit Airport detained and interrogated the Bangladesh-born, US artist, Hasan Elahi, as he tried to board his flight. He was detained on terrorism suspicions. While Elahi’’ background is not critical to this paper, it is noteworthy that being a Muslim, and bearing “an Arab name”, his identity played a role in his ordeal and those of many Muslims in the wake of September 9 terrorist attacks on the United States. He, like many other Muslims, was listed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) database as a terrorist suspect, and was subjected to surveillance, arrests, detention, and deportation. Elahi was “mistakenly” apprehended at the Detroit Airport when the security apparatus got information about an “Arab man” who allegedly left behind a cache of explosives as the “Arab man” fled on September 12, 2001, three days after the terrorist attacks on the United States. Before his ‘arrest’ and interrogation, Elahi had kept track of his movement with the aid of a hand-held Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) as a ready proof that he was not a terrorist. When the FBI continued inviting him for further interrogations rather than clear him after they discovered that his initial arrest and detention were a “mistake”, Elahi began meticulous processes of documenting his own movement and activities himself, as a new technique of investigation. This process soon turned into and art project, Tracking Transience: Orwellian Project.

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EL ANATSUI

•El Anatsui is a Ghanaian born sculptor and installation artists who have been living in Nsuka, eastern Nigeria since    His current oeuvre is large scale installations made of bottle-tops held together by copper wire. In his installation piece titled ‘Earth’s Skin” (2007) (Brooklyn Museum) El used thousands of aluminum bottle  neck rings that he sourced from manufacturing and recycling  units to produce metallic cloth-looking  wall sculptures that he gives the appearance of rigid forms even though they are flexible and manipulatable.  In El’s practice, he employs technology in all its 3 distinct forms: as process embedded into tools, instruction, and as know-how or experience. The bottle tops as El’s primary medium have historical significance and require special tools and handling to transform into art works. Historically, the liquors (in which the bottles first came) are imported from mainly Europe and consumed in Africa. The empty bottles are then repurposed for other domestic uses such as storing water, cooking oil, and other condiments, and for commercial purposes like storing kerosene, nuts, and other goods. It is even used as a standard of measurement by market women in many African Markets for certain kinds of goods, and during the colonial times, became a part of the African traditional shrine paraphernalia as the bottles were then “planted” top-down in the soil around heaths and sacred mounds, creating a troubling link between  Western industrial production and African traditional Religion. On why he used bottle-tops, El reveals that he looked for “something that had more relationship to me” Something that will “draw connection between consumption, waste, and the environment.”

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ANN LOVELESS

Ann Loveless lives in Frankfort, Michigan, US.

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