[spectre] Evidence Locker by Jill Magid at Aksioma Project Space

[Aksioma]

Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, presents:

*Jill Magid*
*/Evidence Locker
/*
/Solo Exhibition
/
www.aksioma.org/evidence.locker <http://www.aksioma.org/evidence.locker>

*Aksioma | Projektni prostor*
Komenskega 18, Ljubljana
19 June – 5 July 2013
*Exhibition opening: Wednesday, 19 June 2013 at 8 pm
*

After receiving a Master’s degree in Visual Studies at MIT Boston in 
2000, with a thesis entitled /Monitoring Desire/, Magid started working 
on a complex body of work exploring the relationships between 
surveillance and voyeurism, control and desire. Her work often involves 
dispositifs of surveillance and entities that conduct surveillance, such 
as police and secret services. The subject of surveillance is often her 
own body, which Magid exposes to the impersonal eye of the surveillance 
camera in the attempt to reach the eye of the beholder. In her early 
works, she wears clothing and shoes lined or fitted with mirror panels, 
and she designs mirror tools to capture things otherwise impossible to 
hold. In the performance /Lobby 7/ (1999), performed in the main lobby 
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Magid hijacks the lobby’s 
informational monitor, interrupting its daily broadcast with a 
transmission that features real-time exploration of her body via a 
lipstick surveillance camera, which she holds in her hand. The natural 
evolution of this research is the /Surveillance Shoe/ (2000), a pair of 
high-heeled shoes equipped with an infrared surveillance camera, which 
records what is usually hidden to the eye.

In /Evidence Locker/ Jill Magid engaged Citywatch, Liverpool’s 
closed-circuit video surveillance system. Her strategy for gaining 
access made use of an exception to the law that all footage be erased 
after 31 days: if a person sends in a request form describing who they 
are, where they were, and what they were doing (along with a photo and 
ten pounds), the police must store the footage in the evidence locker 
for seven years. Magid made such a request for 31 days straight, in the 
manner of love letters and diary entries.
She ultimately developed a rapport with the agents of Citywatch and they 
began following her, assisted by her recognisable patterns of movement 
and the red coat she wore for that purpose. As Magid and Citywatch 
became more aware of each other, issues of trust and pitfalls in the 
logic of the system also came out.
/Evidence Locker/ consists of video installations of Citywatch’s footage 
as well as written correspondence and a website, which allows access to 
the work, however, it also contains certain elements (such as emails 
sent to the website viewer unlocking further parts of the site) which 
control the viewer’s experience in such a way as to correspond to 
Magid's narrative.

As the artist wrote in 2007, “I seek intimate relationships with 
impersonal structures. The systems I choose to work with, such as 
police, secret services, CCTV and forensic identification, function at a 
distance, with a wide-angle perspective, equalizing everyone and erasing 
the individual. I seek the potential softness and intimacy of their 
technologies, the fallacy of their omniscient point of view, the ways in 
which they hold memory (yet often cease to remember), their engrained 
position in society (the cause of their invisibility), their authority, 
their apparent intangibility and, with all this, their potential 
reversibility.”

/Evidence Locker/ is part of the permanent collection at the Whitney 
Museum of American Art.


*Jill Magid* graduated from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, with a 
Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She then studied at MIT and received a 
Master of Science degree in Visual Studies. She was artist in residence 
at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 2001 to 
2002 and at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York from 2006 
to 2007. Magid's work has been shown at the Yvon Lambert Galleries in 
New York and Paris, the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Whitney Museum in 
New York, and the Tate Modern in London. Her performances and 
installations have been shown worldwide in numerous group shows and fairs.


*Production of the exhibition:* Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary 
Art, Ljubljana, 2013
www.aksioma.org <http://www.aksioma.org>

Artistic Director: Janez Janša
Executive Producers: Marcela Okretič, Sonja Grdina
Public Relations: Mojca Zupanič
Technician: Valter Udovičić

*Partners:* The Influencers (Barcelona), Link - Center for the Arts of 
the Information Age (Brescia)
*Thanks:* Modern Gallery Ljubljana, Institute Zank


/*The programme of Aksioma Institute is supported by the Ministry of 
Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana.*
Sponsor: Datacenter d.o.o./
*Contact:*
Marcela Okretič / aksioma4 at siol.net
<mailto:sonjagrdina at gmail.com>
*Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana*
Neubergerjeva 25, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
www.aksioma.org <http://www.aksioma.org>







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