Deutsche Boerse : “Watched V“- Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and C/O Berlin to host discussion “Safe Unsafe”

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and C/O Berlin will host a new discussion of the 'Watched!' series on the topic of surveillance art & photography. The event entitled 'Safe Unsafe' will take place on 30 March 2016. The urban sociologist Dominik Haubrich poses the question of why our society increasingly feels unsafe despite extensive security measures using surveillance. Together with C/O Berlin curator Ann-Christin Bertrand, he will speak on the artistic response to the complexities of modern surveillance. This is also the subject in the works featured in the current exhibition entitled Watched! Surveillance, Art & Photography, which is on display at C/O Berlin in Amerika Haus, Berlin.

Hackers have once again broken into the IT headquarters of a large corporation. Thousands of customers of a telecommunications provider no longer have internet access and don't know what's happened to their data. A doll is set to record conversations in a child's room and store them in the cloud. Just headlines or a real threat?

Reading emails while waiting for the bus, checking the pulse counter in the nightly yoga class, snapping a photo of brunch at the cafe, and sending a quick WhatsApp message before the movie starts at the cinema - all of these seemingly normal acts are now interwoven in an array of security-related issues and questions. Security or the search for it by means of technical, political or legal innovations is increasingly determining our everyday lives. At the same time, becoming unsafe dominates both our personal discourse and the discourse of the media. Subjective insecurity now ranks among the leading concerns for Germans. But which relationships can be established between the search for security and becoming unsafe? Why are we more and more unsafe even though we continuously ramp up efforts to protect ourselves? All these dialectical questions are to be addresses in this lecture.

Surveillance has long been a major issue in society. Sociologists, psychologists, lawyers, politicians and artists address the different forms of surveillance and their effects on individuals and entire groups. They don't merely concentrate on issues of privacy and the potential threat to individuals through governmental and private sur­veillance, but rather critically and playfully deal with the various forms of daily sur­veillance as constitutive part of our social lives. Given this universal development, the question arises: What effect does this have on us? How are these develop­ments reflected in artistic works? And how can contemporary art and media theory contribute to a better understanding of our modern surveillance society?

With the series Watched! - Surveillance Art & Photography the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation and C/O Berlin address the different forms of surveillance and their effects and present different commentaries and reactions from the perspective of contemporary art and media experts.

Media Contact
Leticia Adam

leticia.adam@deutsche-boerse.com +49 69 2 11 12766

About Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation

The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation is a Frankfurt-based non-profit organisation. The foundation activities focus on collecting, exhibiting and promoting contemporary photography. Deutsche Börse began to build up its collection of contemporary photography in 1999. Expanding the Art Collection Deutsche Börse which comprises today more than 1,700 works by over 100 international artists, is one of the key aims of the foundation. The collection and a changing exhibition programme are open to the public. Together with The Photographers' Gallery in London, the foundation awards the renowned Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize each year. Other focal points include promoting new talent, supporting exhibition projects of international museums and institutions, and the expansion of platforms for academic discussion about the medium.

For more information please visit www.deutscheboersephotographyfoundation.org.