Laura Poitras: Astro Noise
Whitney Museum
Curator: Jay Sanders
February 5–May 1, 2016
"
This show was amazing. From the curation, to the layout, to the pieces themselves, this show was well put together to a "T". The political commentary on US Politics post 9/11 was thorough, engaging, and revealing. I found that it was an amazingly put together piece. A whole room engaged each piece, and each room was darkly lit, so that each of the screens you encountered was the sole light of the room.
As you enter the first room, there are two screens, hanging back to back, and the first screen that you encounter is a film of people on a street, watching, looking, reacting, observing, and you are close up on the faces of the viewers. This sets up the tone for the whole exhibition, and encouraging the graveness of the sights that you would encounter as you passed through the rest of the exhibit. The screen on the back of this first piece is footage from an interrogation of two prisoners later to be transferred to Guantanamo Bay Prison. This video was not violent, but the deep sense of terror as you watch the prisoners be spoken to harshly, and moved with bags on their heads, you at every moment expected there to be violence. This anxiety followed you to the next room as you make your way through the exhibition.
As you enter the next room, you encounter a large table, low to the ground, upon which you are supposed to lay and watch the skies of four different place across the globe, two of which being Pakistan and the USA. As you lay you watch the sky as framed by certain everyday landmarks, such as palm trees or airplanes, different things that denoted the variations in the skies. This was a strange experience as you lay upon this hard table beside a bunch of strangers, and you were aware of your own discomfort as much as you were aware of the variations in the sky. The skies, however, though they were different, were largely the same, and this encouraged me to believe in the universal human, despite the distance of borders and countries, we are all under the same sky. However, you notice that there is a stray black dot in the middle of the screen, and decided that that is just what holds up the screen.
You move from this room to the next room, you have a row of lit, small pockets in the wall, wrapping all the way around the room, and each of these pockets is a window, which you look into. Each window contains a screen or a document, each with its own commentary on the events of the surveillance world post-9/11. Some of the screens plays a video or an interview with various players in the game, some people who were held prisoner and tortured, some who were military personnel, and some were just footage of the surveillance all around us. Each of the documents described an event, defined a term, or gave orders or permissions to groups based solely on the context of post-9/11 USA, and the allowances that our government made in terms of surveillance or detaining and capturing of perceived enemies. This was an incredibly powerful piece to me, forcing an understanding of what truly happened in the early 2000’s, and who were truly the players in the game. As you proceed to the last room, you are confronted with a screen, upon which is the heat-sensing video footage of the bodies of all of the viewers on the table, watching the sky piece upon the ceiling. This truly rounded out the exhibition for me, forcing the understanding that not only are “we” surveying “them”, but also “we” are surveying “us”. Everyone is subject to constant surveillance, and in this system, we are willing participants, just as we are within the art piece.
Truly, to me, this was an apt cultural commentary, on everything from the liberties taken, to the peoples’ lives that are affected, to the sheer scale of the operations enacted. Each of these pieces left you thinking, and none of them were too heavy-handed to accept. Each piece was surprising and inventive, and encouraged the questioning not only of our government but of the world around us. An amazing show, and I look forward to seeing more of Laura Poitras’ work in the future.
Caitlyn Kenney
February 19th