Government Excess And Spying, Via Art
The images that open “Astro Noise,” Laura Poitras’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, are striking, pleasing, and at first impossible to decipher. One shows rows of horizontal stripes intersected by curved lines swooping down diagonally; another looks to be some kind of airborne vehicle with a burst of light in front of it; a third has the suggestion of sound waves across the canvas.
Nothing is what it seems in the exhibition by Ms. Poitras, the journalist and filmmaker made famous by her association with the former government contractor Edward J. Snowden. Mr. Snowden’s decision to copy information about the surveillance apparatuses of the United States and Britain, and Ms. Poitras’s decision to help him, got them denounced as traitors by those who said they hurt national security.
To Ms. Poitras, the new project offers a different opportunity to make the same point. And using visual art, she believes, might help address the sort of public numbness brought on by so many revelations about government overreach. These pretty pictures were from the Snowden files and show descrambled images — from Israeli and Syrian drone feeds, among other sources — secretly intercepted by the British.
Ms. Poitras, 51, has already irritated the United States, its allies and some of its enemies by bringing attention to the Snowden material through newspaper articles for which she shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2014, and a documentary, “Citizenfour,” which won an Academy Award in 2015. (She also won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2012.) She has never had a solo art exhibition before. But this installation reflects the same sort of preoccupations that have fueled all of her work: government excess; the mass surveillance of citizens; the paranoia that she says has driven so much intelligence policy since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001; the long arm of what Ms. Poitras calls the “deep state,” meaning, she said, “the hidden state, the one we don’t elect.”
The exhibition, which opened February 5, takes up the entire eighth f loor, with five separate pieces comprising videos, written materials and photographs from the Snowden files and other sources, including government documents about surveillance of Ms. Poitras that she procured only after suing the government for their release. The pieces can each stand individually but are meant to be experienced in order, as a progression. “Hopefully you’ll leave with a different mindset than when you started,” she said.
In one installation, two videos run concurrently, the first showing footage taken by Ms. Poitras at ground zero shortly after the September 11 attacks, the other showing two suspects being interrogated by the American military in Afghanistan. The works force the viewer to think about the way one wrong can lead to another, about what people do in the name of freedom.
In the exhibition, visitors can listen to a harrowing interview in which a Turkish citizen describes his experiences as a prisoner of American forces in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.
Ms. Poitras intends the installation to allow audiences to become engaged in a new way with her ideas and the material. “We know that Guantánamo is still open, but do we really know what that means?,” she said. “The idea is to experience an emotional understanding, so it’s not just an intellectual abstraction.”
She added: “So many shocking things have been released, and what’s surprising is how little anything actually shocks people.”