Curated by Franziska Nori

“What you see is what you see,” Frank Stella famously pronounced, but nothing could be further from the truth for Trevor Paglen, for whom what is seen is just the beginning. The New York-based artist’s lush, technologically enhanced imagery reveals what is hidden—secret satellites suddenly appear like bright stars, classified military bases emerge as shining Babylons, drones manifest as tiny black blots in the sky—and yet such visualizations do not stop at some tautological objectivity. Rather, they mark a vast world of covert information beyond our reach. This exhibition presents twenty-five projects, including Autonomy Cube, 2014, which provides a zone of private, anonymized Internet access; documentation of Paglen’s investigations; and a contest for the best photographs of “landscapes of surveillance” in Germany, from American NSA bases to embassies, inviting the public to join Paglen’s never-ending hunt.

— Michelle Kuo