[spectre] Faith in Exposure - Exhibition and Seminar - 24 February – 17 March

[Marieke Istha]

Faith in Exposure

Exhibition and Seminar
24 February – 17 March
Opening exhibition 23 February, 17.00 – 19.00 hour

Beirut Letters, De Geuzen, Govcom.org, Lynn Hershman, Olia Lialina & 
Dragan Espenschied, Avi Mograbi, Sean Snyder, Thomson & Craighead, Jody 
Zellen

Nanette Hoogslag / Oog (Volkskrant): Jimpunk, Graham Harwood, Micheal 
Magruder, Laure Ghorayeb, Rob Hamelinck & Nienke Terpsma, Kessels 
Kramer, Jeroen Kooijmans, Jochem Niemandsverdriet, Max Kisman, Tjebbe 
van Tijen, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukacs
Lust: Thomas Castro, Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen, Jeroen Barendse, Willem van 
den Hoed, Han Hoogerbrugge
Occulart: Geoff Lillemon, Jody Zellen, Motomishi Nakamura, Jonas Ohllson

Curated by David Garcia

This exhibition and seminar addresses the central narrative of western 
democracy our 'faith in exposure', the unquestioning belief that the 
circulation of knowledge through news media (and other means) constrains 
the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world where we may know but 
are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure is a platform for artists 
and researchers to ask whether it is still tenable believe the central 
myth of the information age; that knowing the truth shall make us free.

Seminar
Saturday 24th of February
13.30 – 16.30 hours
With Jodi Dean, Noortje Marrse, Rchard Rogers, moderated by David Garcia
The seminar accompanying the exhibition Faith in Exposure will take 
place on the 24th of  February. It will begin with a key-note 
presentation by leading US political and media theorist Jodi Dean. 
Dean’s book “Publicity’s Secret“ approaches (according to Slavoj Zize), 
the key issue of critical theory: “how are we to subtract the authentic 
democratic impulse from its perversion in the media manipulated notion 
of public and public support”. Part of Dean's book involved looking for 
sites of resistance even in odd places like UFO and conspiracy theories.
For the seminar has prepared a talk Dean which deepens her interrogation 
of the ways in which conspiracy theories operate in the public domain. 
Entitled Popular Credibility, the presentation will address matters of 
certainty and conspiracy theory around 9/11 and will involve showing and 
analysing portions of a video that has been circulating the Internet 
called Loose Change.
Also present at the seminar and acting as respondents to Dean’s 
presentation will be Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers, two important 
Amsterdam based theorists who have both, in different ways, challenged 
dominant conceptions of the ‘public’ and rethought our conceptions of 
how democracy has changed since its fate became entwined in the Internet.
Reservations: info at montevideo.nl, +31 (0)20 6237101
Entrance 10,- ( students 8,-)

Exhibition
Our goal with this exhibition is to temporarily transform the 
Netherlands Media Art Institute into a center for what the artists 
collective De Geuzen call “multi-visual research”. Not only a gallery 
space alone but an “art and knowledge workshop”. This is why the 
Amsterdam University research network Govcom.org have occupied the 
Netherlands Media Art Institute recently on the basis of a temporary 
residency. During these weeks they have been working with their 
specially developed webcrawler application to investigate fluctuating 
alliances between political issues and celebrity endorsements. 
Govcom.org’s installation will focus on the case study of the Heather 
Mills and Paul McCartney saga and uses this instance to ask whether the 
link between celebrities and issues can be dismissed as the ‘politics of 
distraction’ alone.
The installation Global Anxiety Monitor, the artists collective, De 
Geuzen (a foundation for multi-visual research) deploys Google’s 
multi-lingual image search functions to look at the way different key 
words raise the anxiety temperature of different cultures including 
Arabic, English, Hebrew and Dutch, monitoring the eb and flow of global 
anxiety.
Oog is a remarkable experiment in which the major Dutch national 
newspaper De Volkskrant has opened a space in its on-line edition in 
which each week an artist is commissioned to make visual commentary on 
the news. The project has existed for 18 months and is one of the most 
visited pages on the site, outside the news-pages. From the extensive 
archive Oog’s initiator and curator Nanette Hoogslag has made a small 
selection of pieces to resonate with the Faith in Exposure theme. The 
contents are made accessible though a specially created interface by 
Joes Koppers and Bente van Bourgondiën.
The Beirut Papers is an soul scorching video distributed freely on the 
net during the Israeli incursion into the Lebanon in 2006. A powerful 
example of how the subjects of the news can take control of the 
instruments of representation and dissemination.
Avi Mograbi is an internationally acclaimed documentary film maker. An 
Israeli himself he goes into areas of conflict in Palestine and uses his 
camera and the journalistic role not only to record events but 
occasionally to provoke them. He frequently confronts highly charged 
political and emotional issues head on. His work is an eloquent 
repudiation of the idea of news gathering must be cool and ‘objective’.
Jody Zellen is an artist of remarkable sensitivity who mobilizes a range 
of visualization tools to engage with highly charged news material in 
ways that allow for new spaces of subtle reflection and engagement.
Thomson & Craighead’s installations take to an extreme the notion that 
the news has become little more than a narcotic. They take the notion of 
a visual narcosis to an extreme by deploying the visual paradigm of the 
ticker-tape news feeds that run along the bottom of the screen on 24 
hour news channels and transforming them to an extravagant baroque spirals.
“For the past 40 years,” writes Lynn Hershman, “my work has investigated 
the social construction of identity, most often through the narrative 
construct of an alter ego or ‘agent’ seen as a virtual presence.” DiNA 
is a web agent that uses voice recognition, artificial intelligence 
software, and the Internet to simulate a conversation with the viewer. 
For Hershman, works like DiNA question the notion of privacy and 
personal identity in an era of surveillance and information manipulation.
Olia Lialina was one of the earliest exponents of net-art a practice in 
which the contextual and aesthetic possibilities of the Internet were 
explored in a series of remarkable pieces. Lialina is also a both keen 
historian and an amused commentator on the evolution of the web. In the 
pieces shown in Faith in Exposure she exploits the paradoxes of the news 
paper cover as an interface in the era of screens and networks.

Netherlands Media Art Institute
Montevideo/Time Based Arts
Keizersgracht 254
1016 EV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
T +31 (0)20 6237101
www.montevideo.nl
info at montevideo.nl

The exhibition Faith in Exposure is open Tuesday through Saturday from 
1:00 - 6:00 p.m.; also open on the first Sunday of the month. Entry: € 
2,50 (1,50 with discount)