“This Area is under 23 Hour Video and Audio Surveillance”

The title and subject of the exhibition, This Area is under 23 Hour Video and Audio Surveillance, is a play on Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt’s site-specific intervention at Laumeier Sculpture Park (USA) in 2009. Obsessed with finding the missing hour plotted in Ögüt’s work and the possibilities it promises, the exhibition presents twelve international artists and collectives whose works carve the secluded 24th hour into the physical space and everyday reality of the Jackman Humanities Institute. Employing a myriad of divergent mediums, forms, and strategies, the artworks act as potential points of entry to modes of play by means of the games each artist devises. In particular, the artists challenge the notions of play regulated by today’s rhetoric of productivity: flexibility, distraction and greed; their works contemplate how the rules of games are constructed and how they might be destroyed: through conscious interaction, forms of application, and transgression. This Area is under 23 Hour Video and Audio Surveillance celebrates the power of humour, allowing the viewer to recover from the delusory happiness of ideology towards release into the lucidity of seeing things for what they are.