Counter/Surveillance at Wende Museum

Counter/Surveillance (installation views) (2024–25). Images courtesy of the artists and Wende Museum. Photos: Angel Xotlanihua and Dorian Hill.

At the Wende Museum’s Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency, dozens of objects, artifacts, and archival materials from the German Democratic Republic, the Soviet Union, and the United States, among other countries from both sides of the Iron Curtain, chart the methods through which these states have observed and recorded their own citizens and each other. Given their reliance on image and audio capture, it’s not surprising that many of the objects suggest resonances between surveillance activity and art-making. A collection of hand-drawn facial recognition images (1975–89) used to train East German border guards at Checkpoint Charlie could be mistaken for pages from an artist’s sketchbook, while a covert listening device known as “The Thing” (c. 1952) used to bug the U.S. ambassador’s Moscow residence is revealed to have been invented by Leon Theremin, the Soviet electronic music pioneer and inventor of the eponymous instrument (an example of which can also be seen and heard at the Wende). Spying, it seems, is an art.

On the museum’s main wall, six sets of illustrated eyes peer down on the art and artifacts displayed in several sections of display cases and partition walls. Pieces by around a dozen contemporary artists are also interspersed among the historical objects and clustered at the back of the room. The artworks approach the exhibition’s themes of the history and state of globalized mass surveillance with varying degrees of success, while the inclusion of others feels evasive, as if shoehorned into a concept that seems to limit their conceptual analysis.

Some of the artists engaged in methods of sousveillance,¹ monitoring those who would normally monitor them. Paolo Cirio, for example, gathered unofficial snapshots of high-ranking FBI, CIA, and NSA officials from social media for his series Overexposed (2015), turning them into uncomfortably close-cropped portraits that look like evidence from a forensic case file.² Other artists transformed the records produced by surveillance technologies. Xu Bing’s film Dragonfly Eyes (2017) splices together publicly accessible closed-circuit television footage to fabricate a narrative about a woman who goes missing and the man who assumes her identity. Retaining the anachronistic time codes of the source footage, the dissonant scenes emphasize that records are only as good as their interpretation, and, consequently, the technology that produces them can never actually be objective or apolitical.

Considering the social concerns of the exhibition, and that it is on view in a museum “of the Cold War” whose function is explicitly political, the sociopolitical particulars of some of the artworks could seem down-played in comparison to their historical counterparts. While Counter/Surveillance foregrounds the specific states, authorities, and conditions that gave rise to videos like the East German training film Grenzpassagn (Border Crossing) (1985), for example, less context is provided for those like Yazan Khalili’s Hiding Our Faces Like a Dancing Wind (2016), which presents digital footage of a Palestinian woman obscuring parts of her face with her hands while being recorded on an iPhone. The device’s facial recognition software mistakes her for ancient African and Indigenous American masks stored on its camera roll, reflecting the way racialized communities are often conflated or erased by the colonial gaze, but here the exhibition has less to say about who exactly is being colonized and who is doing the colonizing.

Liat Segal’s site-specific installation Hyperreality (2024) also draws from personal photos on the artist’s smart phone. Simplified into matrices of colored dots and painted onto the windows of the museum, the subjects of these snapshots, from family members to scenes in her hometown of Tel Aviv, could be hard to identify. Segal’s essay in the exhibition’s catalogue offers salient points about how social media makes us all “our own spies,”³ and the illegibility of the images read as a form of resistance to this kind of self-surveillance. Considering the time and place Hyperreality was made (in a militarized border regime and during a “live-streamed genocide”⁴), the fact that Counter/Surveillance seems uninterested in identifying more of the specific issues related precisely to surveillance technology and social media seems to have made the exhibition better equipped to confront Cold War histories than urgent contemporary issues.

Ken Gonzales-Day’s System Overload (2024), a mobile that hangs from the ceiling of the exhibition hall, also seems isolated in its context. Its panels are made from photographs of busts from museum collections, overlaid with different types of measurement markers. The trans-historical subjects and symbols—like a weathered plaster face of an Indigenous Mexican figure currently held in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, layered with bright blue lines that seem to signify artistic proportions—gesture toward some of the pseudoscientific and racist legacies of today’s arts and technology, from physiognomy and phrenology to Western beauty standards. Even as the digital facial recognition grid on a ceramic bust of Lenin (from the Wende’s own collection) introduces contemporary concerns of digital surveillance and policing, hanging above everything else, the work becomes oddly decorative.

Though the exhibition wastes no opportunity to contextualize the historical artifacts on view, devices like miniature cameras and pen microphones—and the Cold War narratives of espionage they invoke—appear almost quaint when seen from the socio-political urgency of the present moment, inundated as it is by ubiquitous, incomprehensible networks of state and commercial surveillance. Many of the contemporary works on view underscore the ingenuity and tenacity of their creators, but the register of detached indeterminacy Counter/ Surveillance seems to relegate them to in the show’s analysis might be an indication of art exhibitions’s limits in the face of these oppressive systems, and how easily these systems can be aestheticized without the responsibility of retrospection. Perhaps we’ll only be able to make sense of our moment of hyper-­surveillance when we can look back on the recordings.

Counter/Surveillance (installation views) (2024–25). Images courtesy of the artists and Wende Museum. Photos: Angel Xotlanihua and Dorian Hill.

Alexander Schneider is a writer and editor currently based in Los Angeles. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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