HANNE NIELSEN & BIRGIT JOHNSEN _ VIDEORAUM

Modern Escape. REVISIT Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen 2018.

Photographer Anders Sune Berg. ( All pictures)

Modern Escape 2018

21:12 min. 

The video installation Modern Escape is focusing on the relation between the individual position and a global political context.

We are in the White Cube, a clean, modernist art space, with design classics, mirror surfaces and grid structures in works and pillars. The room is monitored from above and from below,

The automated camera gaze starts all the way from the floor and ends up in something that gives references to a drone gaze.

At the floor, a camera is mounted on a robot vacuum cleaner and the surveillance gaze is domesticated and forms grid structures in its search for dirt and art thieves. Further up to the ceiling, cameras automatically rotate on turn disks in more levels.

On the wall Andy Warhol's Soup Can with Arthur Danto's words express ‘the end of art', and cans and other ready-mades invade the art space. The art room is transformed into a living room, where a TV include reality by showing excerpts from TV news. At the same time, television commercials offer surveillance equipment and anti-theft devices to keep the world out and appealing to emotions up in time: the fears and fear of the unknown.

However, the reality insist to penetrate; the world is migrating and walls are shooting up in the same hurry as refugee camps. The modern world mobilizes emergency aid, in a form of indulgence, in the form of canisters, sacks, containers, cans and thermo-blankets, which in the micro social space are used instead to barricade themselves against the outside world. Coupled with News reports that are seen sporadically on the TV, it refers to border walls and fences that are increasingly shooting up around the world.

The work problematizes several aspects of surveillance - both how we passively let ourselves register or self-monitor, as the obedient transparent global citizen, who would like to share all information about himself.

At the same time, the surveillance technology is a way of safeguarding us from the strangers and finally the work problematizes how social control, facial recognition, control of populations, in urban space and at borders can causes a powerlessness and deprive us the power to act.

Modern Escape consists of several parts, a video work, a floor plateau as well as robotic vacuum cleaners, an acrylic mobile and a design lamp that is included in the video work as well.

The video is shown projected on a screen.