
MOVING TARGETS: THE WORK OF LAURA POITRAS
WHAT DOES IT FEEL LIKE to look up at the night sky and know that a Predator drone might be directly overhead? In her documentariesmost famously, the explosive CITIZENFOURLAURA POITRAS unsparingly sheds light on the post-9/11 world, from the chaos of occupied Iraq to the outrages perpetrated by a rampant NSA. With her first solo museum exhibition, “Astro Noise,” opening February 5 at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, the artist-filmmaker exchanges illumination for immersion, deploying cinematic tactics in real space to convey the experience of life at the mercy of the security state. Here, STEPHEN SQUIBB considers the significance of both facts and affect in Poitras’s ever-provocative work.
ON FEBRUARY 25, 2013, five weeks after she received her first message from an anonymous NSA whistleblower, and two weeks after her mysterious correspondent went radio silent for reasons unknown, Laura Poitras wrote in her diary:
I think waiting for Citizen Four is distracting me from being able to focus. I’m at the point in 1984 where they have been arrested. I’m dealing with really dark forces.
The next day, she recorded the idea for what would become her exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art:
Why the fuck am I making long-form documentaries when other ways of working are so much