Surveillance has become an inescapable part of daily life. Our phones record our every movement, call, and contact; cameras record our passage along the street; collected data streams to fusion centers; predictive policing targets specific communities for more intensive monitoring; Siri and Alexa listen in. Connected to the economy and mass surveillance, from the high-tech to the low-tech and the mundane everyday, how are artists looking back at, contesting, and revealing the systems that monitor our daily lives? Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic explores the ways in which our lives are being influenced and determined by visible and invisible actions of “watching over”, allowing viewers to reflect on the prevalence of surveillance in contemporary contexts as well as its historical antecedents. The exhibition will be accompanied by a film series and artist talks.

On view October 1 – December 10, 2021, at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design (ICA at MECA&D) located at 522 Congress Street, Portland, Maine. The gallery is open Wednesday – Sunday from 12:00-5:00 pm. An opening reception will be held on October 1st, 2021 from 5:00 – 8:00 pm. Find more information about events related to Monitor here.

A digital catalog of the exhibition is available here.

This exhibition is funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional generous support for the exhibition was provided by Jeremy Moser and Laura Kittle.

Featured Image: Yazan Khalili, Medusa, video installation, 2020 (courtesy of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art).

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