The Wende Museum Presents Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency

Culver City, CA (September 20, 2024) – The Wende is thrilled to unveil Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency, a groundbreaking exhibition featuring historical objects in conversation with contemporary artworks from across the globe. This dynamic exhibition explores historical and currently evolving aspects of surveillance and countersurveillance, drawing from a diverse range of geographical and sociological contexts and countries as wide-ranging as Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Palestine, Romania, and the United Kingdom.

In recent decades, technological advances have supercharged surveillance, but the concerns they raise about privacy and government control are not new. Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency traces the historical roots of modern surveillance devices, the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them, and the ways artists have reclaimed agency by critically and creatively responding to—or evading—these technologies. In the 19th century, French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon pioneered identification techniques that prefigured the proto-biometric methods of the Cold War: facial recognition, forensic portraiture, and fingerprinting. Innovative surveillance devices such as miniature cameras and bugs were the stuff of real-life espionage dramas, and by the early 1960s facial recognition was computerized. Along with activists and dissidents, many of those surveilled were artists who then developed creative responses to authoritarian oversight. The exhibition presents an overview of Cold War-era surveillance practices using historical artifacts and artworks from the Wende Museum and other collections, including facial recognition training materials used by East German border guards in the 1970s and 1980s.

This exhibition is curated by the Wende’s Chief Curator Joes Segal and science historian Marieke Drost, and includes artwork from Sadie Barnette, Paolo Cirio, Asya Dodina & Slava Polishchuk, Graham Fink, Ken Gonzales-Day, Damara Inglês, Yazan Khalili, Verena Kyselka, Gerhard Lang, Francisco Masó, Decebal Scriba, Liat Segal, Nedko Solakov, Xu Bing, Yang Jian, and Mail Art from the Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, Berlin.

Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency will be on view from October 13, 2024, to October 19, 2025. The public opening will take place Sunday, October 13 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. A schedule of the day’s events can be found here.

A press preview will take place on Friday, October 11 at 11 a.m., featuring a curator-led tour. If you would like to attend, kindly RSVP by emailing ahartwell@wendemuseum.org.

A press kit featuring images of works featured in the show can be found here.

The Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and archive of the Cold War that preserves history and brings it to life through exhibitions, scholarship, education, and community engagement. Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds an unparalleled collection of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in personal and social change for a better future.

The Wende Museum is open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, visit wendemuseum.org or follow the Wende on social media: @wendemuseum.

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Media Contact
Andrew Hartwell
310-216-1600 x305
ahartwell@wendemuseum.org