As technology develops, our private lives in the global data realms are less and less secure. The increasing policing and control of every individual’s actions is a reality we need to understand and always question. Whistleblowers such as Julien Assange and Edward Snowden have come forward to warn us of the dangerous practices of governments hand in hand with information companies towards the control of knowledge for power. Foucault’s panopticon prevails and we have given unlimited control to the Big Brother.

In this selection of works, artists deal with notions of policing, tracking, security, immigration, loss of individuality and rebellion, all of which are issues that affect us in more than one level. Shilpa Gupta’s photographic series treat issues referent to forces of control and security measures taken while people transit the globe as well as the transient concepts of borders and what we undergo while crossing them. Considering the same issues through the work Migration Patterns, Armando Miguelez has disguisedly taken photographs of the places where we are submitted to the most thorough identity controls, the immigration sections of airports. As a metaphor of crossing borders, these images taken in secrecy are also a portrait of a country’s fears and intimidation apparatuses.

In R.S.V.P (The Closet March) by Jitish Kallat, the artist uses a mirror arrangement as a means to multiply one’s self ad infinitum. This multiplication of the body is also present in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Performance Review UBS, a grid organising 750 different fingertips captured through an interactive piece named Pulse Index that uses high magnification surveillance technology as the one used at the immigration checkpoints.

Karthik KG, recently graduated from AUD, proposes an interactive audio-visual piece using a Kinect sensor and a special software that captures the presence of the visitor in the gallery space. X3 of white noise explores the idea of invisible mapping through technology earlier used by governments and police agencies to sense the presence of individuals in space, today these devices have become accessible to the larger public through games as the Wii and Kinect.

In The State of Affairs, Natalia Ludmila has reinterpreted a series of images she finds in the internet and the media relative to the recent protests around the world. Her watercolours portray protesters and police in empty backgrounds, giving their attitude an eerie feeling of helplessness.

-Vadehra Art Gallery

Featured artists: Shilpa Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Karthik KG, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Natalia Ludmila and Armando Miguelez.