BERLIN.- Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents Circles – the first European solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras. Her works expose state power by focusing on specific individuals confronting it.
Circles includes six prints from the ANARCHIST series (2016) – describing a chain of interception in which drone and satellite footage has been hacked by the GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters, the UK’s signals intelligence service) which was in turn hacked by the NSA (US National Security Agency, responsible for evaluating and decrypting electronic communications), including images from Israeli armed attack drones, the existence of which Israel has denied. This story that Poitras was instrumental in exposing, represents a signal ecosystem of nationstate hacking, surveillance and violence.
The exhibition premieres two new video installations. Terror Contagion (2021–ongoing) an investigation by research agency Forensic Architecture and an accompanying film by Poitras. The work is an in-depth investigation of Israeli cyber-weapons manufacturer NSO Group and the use of its Pegasus malware to target journalists and human rights defenders worldwide. In Terror Contagion (2021), Poitras documents Forensic Architecture’s ongoing investigation into NSO and interviews journalists and human rights defenders targeted with NSO software.
Edgelands (2021), a collaboration with artist Sean Vegezzi, in which Poitras and Vegezzi continue their explorations of how state apparatuses exert control over civilian life. Beginning in 2020, Poitras and Vegezzi began examining deliberately obscured sites of police, surveillance and carceral infrastructure in New York City, including a covert surveillance unit to monitor political activity in the city, and a giant prison ship off the coast of the South Bronx in the city’s East River, on which a medical crisis is unfolding.
Together, these works expose how the ubiquity of surveillance shapes the material infrastructure of our world, and the way surveillance intersects with physical violence and psychological terror.
Laura Poitras (b. 1964 in Boston, lives in New York and Berlin) is a filmmaker, artist, and journalist. She has taught at Yale University, New Haven/Connecticut, and Duke University, Durham/North Carolina, and is a board member of the Freedom of Press Foundation and co-founder of the journalistic documentary platform, Field of Vision.
After receiving historic disclosures from then-anonymous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Poitras broke numerous news stories on global, illegal mass surveillance by the NSA (responsible for intercepting, decrypting, storing and analyzing the communications of hundreds of millions of people around the world) and documented the events in her film, CITIZENFOUR (2014). In 2016, Poitras and her colleagues Henrik Moltke and Cora Currier reported on further disclosures in the Snowden Archive revealing Operation Anarchist, a top-secret program run by GCHQ (the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency): From the top of Troodos Mountains on the island nation of Cyprus, two antennae operate twenty-four hours a day, intercepting signals from satellites, drones and radars in the Mediterranean region.
Poitras’s cinematic language is committed to the tradition of cinéma vérité as well as the effort to trace structures and conflicts that fundamentally shape political and civil life, but which remain largely hidden. Her work focuses on complex developments that circumvent democratic processes in the United States and other countries in the name of counterterrorism measures. With her award-winning films and journalistic research, Poitras has made significant contributions to a broader understanding of the long-term societal implications of the so-called War on Terror. Her reporting on the NSA scandal led to a German parliamentary investigation into the NSA’s mass surveillance in Germany.
Laura Poitras’s work has deep connections to Berlin. In 2006, her film about the US occupation of Iraq, My Country, My Country, premiered at the Berlinale film festival. Soon after, the US government placed Poitras on a terrorist watchlist; for the next six years she was interrogated every time she crossed the U.S. border. In 2012, she relocated to Berlin to protect her sources. She was in Berlin when she was contacted by Edward Snowden. The resulting film CITIZENFOUR (2014) won an Academy Award and the German Film Award. Poitras is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (2012), Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), and Peabody Award (2003). Her reporting on the NSA’s illegal mass surveillance programs received a George Polk Award (2013) and Pulitzer Prize for Public Service (2014). Recent exhibitions of Poitras’s work include: Onsite Gallery, Toronto (2018); Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018); Whitney Museum, New York (solo, 2016); Artists Space, New York (2014); and Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2010).
