Ways of Seeing at düsseldorf photo+ Biennale for Visual and Sonic Media, 2024

In his 1972 BBC series Ways of Seeing, John Berger argues that the way we look at images reveals something about ourselves and the situation in which we live. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, he argues that the meaning of images changes as a consequence of reproducibility. Today, the human constantly morphs into images and data: documented, analysed, and sorted by smart instruments and algorithmic operations. Technical reproducibility dislocates the image as well as the act of observing itself. The exhibition Ways of Seeing seeks to explore unfolding connections between mechanisms of power, control, social responsibility, and narratives of freedom, examining their manifestation or refraction in the presence of and through the lens of observation. Digital operations replace the human gaze. Out of the technical image evolves a technical imagination, no longer oriented toward the human observer.

Focusing on various situations of surveillance, the question arises: what does it mean to see and be seen when eyes do not meet because the direction of interest is obscured? The featured artworks approach surveillance not only as an act of technological observation but also as a selective gaze—seeing what it chooses to. In some cases, surveillance becomes a strategy for a disruptive gaze, where the relationship between observer and observed is reversed by subverting the intended purpose to which such technologies are ordinarily applied. New ways of seeing articulate unknown sites of consciousness, experience, and communication.

Curated by Pola Sieverding and Asya Yaghmurian