Enter the age of anxiety
There couldn’t be a more timely moment for an art exhibition covering decades of festering dread about the present and the future. Curator Omar Kholeif’s show is an unsettling beginning to life after lockdown.
BY ANNA SEAMAN
Approaching the Al Mureijah gallery spaces of the Sharjah Art Foundation in the hottest days of the UAE summer wearing a mandatory face mask and stepping over floor stickers indicating the need to maintain two metres of social distance could hardly have been a more fitting prelude to enter Art in the Age of Anxiety.
The exhibition, three years in planning and comprising over 10 years of research by its curator, Omar Kholeif, Sharjah Art Foundation’s Director of Collections, was initially due to open in March in parallel with the annual March Meeting. However, the coronavirus pandemic delayed its opening until June. The three-month delay served as an extended drumroll to this ever-more-relevant exhibition.
It includes over 30 contemporary artists and displays more than 60 artworks dating back to the early 1990s, which all explore how technology has altered the way we live, work and even think. Anxiety levels ratcheted up to near-frenzy over the Covid-19 outbreak and the ensuing restrictions, and, even as the world was tentatively released from lockdowns, uncertainty reigned. Cue Art in the Age of Anxiety, an exhibition which Sharjah Art Foundation Director and President Hoor Al Qasimi invited Kholeif to host while he was working as co-curator of Sharjah Biennial 14.
FATHER FIGURE (2016) Douglas Copeland. The piece was created as a commentary on Facebook’s corporate initiative to use their powerful facial- recognition algorithm to identify faces on the platform. Top image: SHADOW STALKER (film still, 2019) Lynn Hershman Leeson.
“It is difficult to imagine a more sobering moment for the presentation of this show,” Al Qasimi writes in the catalogue’s foreword. “The devices and technologies that have become an integral part of most of our lives over the past 10 years are now practically indispensable. We are all unquestionably living in an age in which anxiety has become part of our daily life.”
The exhibition is spread over three galleries in Al Mureijah. Sound is the overwhelming constant. Wherever you turn, noise overwhelms you. It begins outside the gallery with the creepy notes of a nursery rhyme floating through the air. Then, upon entering Gallery 1, Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s five-channel audio installation from his series A Convention of Tiny Movements (2015–ongoing) pierces the air. The artwork is based on a scientific study into how everyday objects can become listening devices and this, coupled with the classical music playing nearby as a soundtrack to Cao Fei’s RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007) is enough to catapult the viewer into the no man’s land between the digital world and reality. Cao’s work is a scathing commentary on Chinese consumerism and is accompanied by a second piece from 2009 made in response to the financial crisis of 2008. This artist explores feelings of despair and loss of control that were widespread a decade ago and are still so prevalent in the midst of this current crisis.
Traversing further, there are paintings made by algorithms, robots that react to your presence and a bizarrely striking piece by South African conceptual artist Bogosi Sekhukhuni, who created a dual-channel video installation of a conversation between two animated floating heads representing himself and his father.
YOGA / LAKES (2017, above) Video installation by Cory Arcangel. THE FUTURE OF TELEVISION (2012, below) Jeremy Bailey. In the future, as the artist imagines it, screens would be embedded in our faces, with content determined by our mood and controlled through facial movements.
Consciousness Engine 2: absentblackfatherbot (2013) is based on real Facebook Messenger correspondence, but again the question of reality is thrown into the ring. With simulated voice software recounting a seemingly banal conversation there is an element of familiarity about this piece, but the fact that the heads have green and blue skin and pink eyes keeps them in the realm of fantasy.
The exhibition was inspired by the infiltration of social media and the power it wields. Kholeif says: “I began to question how our consciousness is formed: how we consume, digest and believe in different forms of information. It is what political scientist William Davies has dubbed Nervous States—a new normal—a condition where we no longer use our rational minds but our emotional minds to react to the world and make decisions. I wanted to [explore] what it means to make art in an era of perpetual uncertainty.”
CATT (2010) Eva & Franco Mattes. The artist duo’s work analyses and responds to contemporary digital life, approaching its ethics and politics with dark humour.
An emotional response that leaves the viewer unable to pinpoint his or her precise reaction is another element that runs through this enormous exhibition like a red thread. One is not sure whether the art is inducing anxiety or if anxiety is producing the art.
Playing almost silently and ominously at the back of Gallery 1 is Trevor Paglen’s Circles (2015), a bird’s-eye video of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters, the base from where technological surveillance is carried out through a centralised intelligence system. Shot from a helicopter, the video pans above the circular structure, its alien shape seems increasingly appropriate for a place where machines are more powerful than men.
Video, animation and digital works are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the lingua franca in this exhibition. As a viewer moves from one immersive encounter to another it is difficult to separate the effects of one artwork from the next. This is an experience akin to the mental overload of information and images that happens if you scroll too quickly through a social media feed.
The design of the exhibition adds to this discombobulation. These ordinarily clean, white spaces have been transformed into grey-walled, warren-like dens, supposed to be a physical construction of the internet. The effect is startling. There are times when I am genuinely not sure whether I’m alone in the gallery or if another visitor is just around the corner. The constant chatter surrounding me intensifies in the second gallery, where a video performance by Jeremy Bailey explores society’s intense and physical relationship with technology. While many of us are never more than a metre away from our devices now, The Future of Television (2012) imagines a future where screens are embedded into our faces. On the one hand, this is a playful prediction and on the other, a dark commentary on the invasive nature of almost ubiquitous screens.
CLOUD #865 HOUGH CIRCLE TRANSFORM (2019) Trevor Paglen. Installation view, Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2020. The design of this exhibition adds to the viewer’s feeling of confusion.
Also embarking upon a weird and wonderful imaginative musing is Jenna Sutela, a Finnish artist, who produced nimiia cétiï (2018). This audio-visual presentation proposes a possible Martian language. Created using machine learning and information channelled by a 19th-century psychic medium, Sutela’s piece projects a geometric scribble over a montage of unknown landscapes accompanied by garbled and eerie tones voiced by the artist herself. It is, according to the artwork description, the artist’s attempt to connect us to worlds beyond our consciousness. Maybe this is what the language of the internet looks like when it takes over and talks to itself?
One of the most arresting artworks in this exhibition is Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Shadow Stalker (2019) which stars January Steward as a character called The Spirit of the Deep Web. Drawing attention to internet systems used by law enforcement such as predictive policing—an attempt to foresee crime using algorithms—the video is a critical commentary on excessive surveillance and the misuse of data. It ends with a sinister observation on the pervasive memory of the internet—“like DNA, history refuses to evaporate”—as well as asserting the cold, hard fact that data has now become more valuable than oil.
However, whilst this performance may leave one feeling bleak, Kholeif insists that the show is not an exercise in dystopia. “I am not a digital dystopian like many. I am a utopian in many ways who believes in connection. However, I believe that we must be aware of the infrastructures that fuel and determine the technologies that we use so that our decision-making is informed and our consciousness is clear and balanced.”
