Exhibiton
8 - 23 November, 2018
Exhibition opening
Thursday, 8 November, 2018, 20:00
Filodrammatica Gallery, Korzo 28/1, Rijeka
Gallery opening hours
Mon – Fri 17:00 – 20:00h (contact us to arrange the morning visits)
Lost in Translation
Steganography is a form of secret writing – the art and science of disguising hidden information within public information. At the centre of this practice is the instrumentalisation of the innocent to evade surveillance, censorship and control.
The verb ‘to launder’ refers to the act of legitimising illegally obtained money to wash away its questionable traces. In contrast, the idiom ‘to air out dirty laundry’ is analogous to disclosing secrets publicly. The first speaks of erasure, removal, suppression, censorship, while the latter speaks of revealing, talking, leaking, publishing.
Photo: Tanja Kanazir / Drugo more (Flickr gallery)
The exhibition Hutong Whispers by the artist Amy Suo Wu is a steganographic catalogue of steganographic publishing projects camouflaged as a laundry line. The exhibition co-opts three omnipresent elements in the Chinese urban landscape – bedsheets; Shanzhai fashion, a Chinese phenomenon that features nonsense English; and QR codes – exploring them as covert media to publish sensitive and suppressed knowledge. This installation is designed to be eventually placed back into the traditional residential alleys of Beijing or hutongs, so that it may return back to its natural habitat, the context by which it was originally inspired.
Video-report of the opening by Moja Rijeka internet portal
The exhibition will open at Filodrammatica Gallery (Korzo 28/1, Rijeka) on Thursday, 8 November at 20:00, and will stay on view until 23 November, working days from 17:00 until 20:00. If you wish to visit the exhibition in some other time, contact us by e-mail at info[at]drugo-more.hr or by phone at +385 51 212 957.
Admission is free.
Inside the hutongs, bedsheets and blankets are hung on laundry lines that stretch from entrances of homes onto the street. They can be read as transgressive objects because of their migratory nature trespassing the lines between public and private. Bedclothing is also perfect cover, literally and metaphorically. The blanket is a nondescript agent, detectable but unremarkable. Because of its ordinariness, it is free from suspicion and can smuggle (air out) private information to the public setting.
Shanzhai fashion is similarly ripe for steganographic instrumentalisation. Its English characters are not designed to be read but rather to function as an ornament and value signifier of Western culture, embodying ‘high culture’, ‘edginess’ and ‘coolness’. However, for English readers, texts may appear as dada poetry, accidental wisdom or absurd word salads. Hutong Whispers takes advantage of the illegibility of English in the context of its use as ornamentation, staging the aestheticisation of foreign language as a steganographic medium.
The final tactical site for steganography is the QR code, a technology made massively popular in China thanks the QR scanner built into WeChat, the nation’s most widely used app. To give an idea of its level of ubiquity: Informal street vendors and beggars use QR codes as modes of transaction. In light of QR’s pervasive visual presence, it inadvertently provides guileless disguise for sensitive knowledge to travel.
Hutong Whispers reconfigures previous work by the artist into hidden information. The first piece, Thunderclap (2017), is a steganographic zine that piggybacks on fashion accessories as a publishing surface for the erased writings of Chinese anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen (1886-1920). Another work featured is The Choice of a Translator (2018), the transcription of a talk on censorship and steganography given in Beijing wherein a suspected government spy was part of the audience. The transcript reveals how the translator reshapes and depoliticises the content of the talk, positioning the act of translation as a tool for censorship and steganography.
Hutong Whispers also includes its genesis, a selection of tactical and strategic uses of steganography that inspired the exhibition. As a whole, the project functions as a basic technical primer on steganography as a type of secret writing.
Last but not least, the show includes related projects and references submitted by Clara Balaguer (Hardworking Goodlooking), Dušan Barok (Monoskop), Kelly Doley, Jessie Yingying Gong, Linda Zeb Hang, Elaine W Ho, Janez Janša (Aksioma Institute), Woodstone Kugelblitz, Javier Lloret, Silvio Lorusso, Nadine Stjins and Nathalie Wuerth.
Born in China, raised in Sydney and based in Rotterdam, Amy Suo Wuis an artist, designer and educator researching how technology, language and media shape people and vice versa. Her research based hybrid practice is an exploration into how to activate and intervene in critical and playful ways. Since 2013 she has been working at the Willem de Kooning Academy (Dutch Academy of art and design based in Rotterdam) teaching Design Research, Concept and Image in the Graphic Design department and the Hacking minor to students across all disciplines. In the same year, she co-founded Eyesberg, a (graphic) design studio motivated by conceptual and experimental approaches. She has also facilitated and organized zine making workshops and festivals in the Netherlands. Her work has been shown at ISEA Istanbul, festivalu Moje, tvoje, naše 2016, galeriji 12 New Media Hub Belgrade, 55th Venice Biennale, Gogbot Enschede, SIGN Groningen, TENT Rotterdam, Showroom MAMA Rotterdam, Art Rotterdam, WORM Rotterdam, V2_ Rotterdam and Aksioma Ljubljana.
