Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 – 10 cases 10 data restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. Taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer Giacomo Casanova, imprisoned in the Prigioni in 1755, Cheang has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including the Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary cases from Taiwan and South Africa. Their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-metre cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The installation Infinity and Infinity Plus One by Cao Shu is a modern fable of destruction, collective consciousness, and future memory told through the lens of a seaside hotel erected in the 1990s on an island in China. Combining 3D-rendered images and shot footage, the work travels through a seemingly-unlimited number of rooms, infinite corridors, and breathtaking viewpoints on site. Meanwhile, an official voiceover tells an absurd story about philosophy and mathematics in the form of a monologue.