Laura Poitras. Circles

18. Juni 2021 – 8. August 2021

Curator: Marius Babias

n.b.k. Showroom

Dara Birnbaum. Talking Back to the Media

18. Juni 2021 – 6. August 2021

Curator: Arkadij Koscheew

From June 18 – August 8, 2021, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) presents Circles, the first European solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Laura Poitras. Her works expose state power by focusing on specific individuals confronting it.

Among other things, the exhibition premieres two new video installations:
Terror Contagion (2021–ongoing) an investigation by research agency Forensic Architecture and an accompanying film by Poitras. The work is an in-depth investigation of Israeli cyber-weapons manufacturer NSO Group and the use of its Pegasus malware to target journalists and human rights defenders worldwide. In Terror Contagion (2021), Poitras documents Forensic Architecture’s ongoing investigation into NSO and interviews journalists and human rights defenders targeted with NSO software.

Edgelands (2021), a collaboration with artist Sean Vegezzi, in which Poitras and Vegezzi continue their explorations of how state apparatuses exert control over civilian life. Beginning in 2020, Poitras and Vegezzi began examining deliberately obscured sites of police, surveillance and carceral infrastructure in New York City, including a covert surveillance unit to monitor political activity in the city, and a giant prison ship off the coast of the South Bronx in the city’s East River, on which a medical crisis is unfolding.

During a livestream, Laura Poitras, Eyal Weizman, Shourideh Molavi, and Sean Vegezzi talk with host Heba Y. Amin about the works in the exhibition, the ubiquity of surveillance systems and the way they shape the material infrastructure of our world, and how surveillance intersects with physical violence and psychological terror.