Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen

Visibility Machines explores the unique roles artists Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen play as meticulous observers of the global military industrial complex. Investigating forms of military surveillance, espionage, war-making, and weaponry, Farocki and Paglen each examine the deceptive and clandestine ways in which military projects have deeply transformed, and politicized, our relationship to images and the realities they appear to represent. The exhibition initiates critical questions about the crucial part images play in revealing essential but largely concealed information. The exhibition places the oeuvres of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen within the broader cultural and historical developments of photography, film, and new media.

Video artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki addresses the primary links between technology, politics, and coercion. Establishing a critical dialogue with images, image-making, and the institutions that produce them, he reveals increasingly complex relationships between people and machines, vision and violence. Visual artist and photographer Trevor Paglen investigates the covert activities of U.S. secret military operations, collectively known as the “Black World.” Aligning himself with the study of the politics of perception, Paglen utilizes complex technologies of seeing in order to reveal the historical relationships between photography and political domination.