Embedded Art, Akademie Der Kunst, Berlin, Germany, 2009
Control Room 2 6m x 18m oil, acrylic, pigment ink, paper on billboard print
We were commissioned to make Control Room 2 for Embedded Art , a group exhibition dealing with issues of surveillance. We got the background image of a control room printed as three 6 metre by 6 metre street posters on blue back billboard paper.
Pasting them butted up together, directly onto the untreated concrete wall we then collaged about 100 images onto the base paper and scraped into the images using industrial grinders, tearing at the paper and adding oil and acrylic paint. Trying to encapsulate the separate works in the show which dealt with surveillance from the domestic to the military, our work uses images of police action (mainly in Germany where it was made for) to the Allied occupation of Iraq . We show images of state torture adjacent to surveillance photos of western streets. Looking at the work, the audience is watching the watched looking back at them, while all the while being filmed and projected in another part of the exhibition.
The work was destroyed by the Akademie at the end of the show in March 2009.
we had to paste up a base layer of random billboard sheets before pasting up the real base image, donated by a mate, Fibs helped us – thanks Fibs!
relief when we finished pasting up the base image
the public could view the work from above…………..
photos by Kristian Buus
