Suzanne Treister, Post-Surveillance Art (2015)

Suzanne Treister, POST-SURVEILLANCE ART POSTERS, 2014. Installation view, 2015, Primary, Nottingham. Photography by James E Smith

Primary Studios, Nottingham. Part of Acting Out Nottingham 2015

Suzanne Treister’s Post-Surveillance Art is a brazen, colourful and psychedelic comment on our post-Edward Snowden reality. This exhibition takes contemporary surveillance culture as a given and attempts to represent what this culture looks like, its imagery, its vocabulary, its aspirations and its potential futures. Reflecting a post-surveillance mindset, the work plays with the imagery of organisations that store all our data, such as the National Security Agency in the USA and GCHQ in the UK and suggests future hypothetical social states of being and awareness. The posters are ambiguous in their political position, with their vivid colours, computerised graphics and bold proclamations representing ‘a kind of hallucinogenic drug induced visionary landscape, a kind of pop poetry’ for our post-surveillance age.

Since the late 1980s Treister’s work has explored new developments and histories of technology, investigating structures of power, both visible and hidden. Through her revelations Treister allows us to re-act to these systems of knowledge and assumptions of truths.

Acting Out Nottingham 2015 was a festival celebrating artistic expression through performative engagement at the interface of art and mental health through an investigation of the concept of ‘acting out’. The starting point for the programme was the contested term ‘acting out’, which connects psychological language with the rhetoric of social order and performativity. This exploration is intended to facilitate collaborations between arts and health disciplines in order to change the way that deviant behaviour is perceived.