I'm a Finnish-Dutch artist, organiser and teacher living in Amsterdam-Noord. In my work I explore the revolutionary potential of collective creativity. As an autodidact DJ, filmmaker and anarchist, clubs are my art school and protests my phd.
I'm a Finnish-Dutch artist, organiser and teacher living in Amsterdam-Noord. In my work I explore the revolutionary potential of collective creativity. As an autodidact DJ, filmmaker and anarchist, clubs are my art school and protests my phd.
10.10.2014 - 08.03.2015
Artists: AeraCoop (Lot Amorós, Cristina Navarro y Alexandre Oliver), Lot Amorós, James Bridle, Alicia Framis, Laurent Grasso, Roger Hiorns, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson (terminal beach), Metahaven, Mariele Neudecker, Martha Rosler, Roman Signer and Hito Steyerl
Exhibition: Juha van 't Zelfde
Exhibition design: Miroslav Rajic
Graphic design: Metahaven
Tags: art, film, international, research
The international group exhibition A screaming comes across the sky focused on the shock and awe of drone warfare. The exhibition, and its associated events, explored the increasingly invisible military technologies that have been responsible for the disappearance of growing numbers of civilians in the past decade, in wars that are largely conducted secretly and unaccountably.
Artists have made some of the most urgent examinations of the impact of drone technology in war. The artists in A screaming comes across the sky made plain the contested ecology of networked military space, revealing how it is subject to surveillance, control and manipulation. From Hito Steyerl’s humorous critique of video surveillance, and James Bridle’s incensed investigation of invisibility, to Metahaven’s psychogeology of network technologies, Laurent Grasso’s phenomenology of flight, and Roger Hiorns’s haunting automation sculptures.
Some of the works were poetic by nature, inviting the audience to placidly reflect. Others created a more immediate, visceral response, making them physically experience awe and apprehension. As often in tragedy, humour can be the most fearless messenger.
In the post-PRISM age of mass surveillance, artists join journalists to reveal the technological infrastructures that enable events like drone-strikes to occur. Like journalism, art reveals aspects of our world that have been deliberately concealed from public view. Art provides us with a way of being able to perceive this militarized part of the landscape, and crucially gives us a language to be able to describe it.