Ongoing artistic research
2019
Entering an airport today, one is as likely to encounter an art exhibition as they would be obliged to consent to intrusive security scans. Exhibitions, site specific installations, and sculptures are no longer the exception, but the norm, when it comes to these spaces of transnational crossing. The increase of cultural activity at airports is usually met with praise, yet, who gets to enter the airport in the first place? And why is there a conflation between people who travel via airplanes and those who consume art?
Surveilling Art at the Airport, or SAATA for short, is an ongoing interdisciplinary research on expanding exhibitions practices inside airports. It approached the airport as a non-place, an international border, a place saturated with surveillance gaze, and as an ideological state apparatus that camouflages its repressive power through a curated atmosphere of free access movement predicated on capital. At the same time, the project aims to connect these practices to a growing body of knowledge on contemporary art’s (CA) aesthetic and institutional reliance on transnational mobility.
Currently, the project SAATA has been developed through a theoretical MA Thesis, lecture-performances, and a growing online archive with public presentations.
Aeroponics Acts, Dutch Art Institute, Silent Green Cultural Center, Berlin 2019, photo: Jacq van der Spek.