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Hasan Elahi: Hiding in Plain Sight Intersection for the Arts San Francisco March 2-April 23, 2011 In 2002, multimedia artist Hasan Elahi was detained upon arrival at customs in the Detroit Metro Airport. He had been put on a governmental no-fly list and was being investigated by the FBI in connection with an alleged terrorist bomb plot stemming from an anonymous tip involving a storage unit he had rented in Tampa, Florida. Elahi underwent months of interrogation and nine back-to-back polygraph tests. Eventually all charges were dropped. Nonetheless, for the Bangladesh-born American artist, this traumatic mix-up with the FBI provided a firsthand look at the center of an unstable post-9/11 political climate, which for Elahi meant a paranoiac nightmare embedded in the rapidly expanding gray area of the government's cloak-and-dagger omnipotence and the "War on Terror." [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] For months after, Elahi checked in with his FBI case agent whenever he traveled by plane. This was a voluntary and self-preservationist strategy. The calls began what would evolve into nearly a decade of self-surveillance of Elahi's daily movements and actions in which he photographs the places he sleeps and eats, the hotels and parking lots he visits, and even the urinals he uses. Elahi's solo exhibition, "Hiding in Plain Sight," was an epic invitation into his everyday life, and this installation was only a part of his massive ongoing project "Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project."(1) Elahi allows gallery viewers, the FBI, and anyone who might visit his website to see his exact location at all times via a GPS tracking device he carries with him. If the United States government really is tracking Elahi, he makes its job much easier. The gallery walls at Intersection for the Arts flashed thousands of low-resolution images of Elahi's daily activities. On one wall over sixty digital picture frames sifted through photos of unending parking lots, immeasurable plates of tacos, and countless platters of airplane food. A toilet filled one frame, while slept-in beds, airport tarmacs, and grocery store aisles flipped casually across the gallery. Elahi literally shows his viewers everything--even his banking records scrolled endlessly up the computer monitors hung vertically on the adjoining wall. These are the ritual moments and ordinary peripheral spaces that surround and support one's life. Yet Elahi rarely captures other people, and if he does, they are framed as incidental passersby. In many ways, Elahi tells us everything about nothing. Such banal and low-resolution images are ubiquitous in the era of camera phones, Flickr, and digital uploads. Over 500 million active users on Facebook ceaselessly upload poor quality images of random plates of food. Millions of users "check-in" on Foursquare everyday, offering their exact location to their social network and creating a digital footprint. … |
