Curated by Jay Sanders

In 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras became the message bearer for Edward Snowden, who contacted her to share documents revealing the NSA’s covert global-spying activities; their interaction formed the core of Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary CITIZENFOUR. Poitras screened and discussed pre-Snowden research on US-government surveillance in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and returns this spring to mount her first solo museum exhibition, for which she will create a series of immersive spaces from a personal archive of materials related to her ongoing investigations of post-9/11 America. Poitras has long stressed the role of storytelling in her filmmaking, and this show promises a narrative experience for attendees, whose exploration of the space will be guided by distinctive architectural interventions. Not your typical exhibition catalogue, the accompanying publication, Astro Noise: A Survival Guide to Living Under Total Surveillance, will be a collection of original works from contributors including Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Ai Weiwei, Jill Magid, and Snowden himself, with a free version to be distributed at events internationally.

— Ed Halter