FUTURE 
Calling Beauty 
The New Administration of 
a Fine Arts Education 
Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven 
Why Farm? 
Winter of Our Discontent 

PAST 
Descent to Revolution 
Agency for Small Claims 
Of Other Spaces 
The New Normal 
To Whom Do You Beautifully Belong? 
Dewey Decimal Days 
Exact Imagination 
Taking Shelter 
Consumption Junction 
Shoot the Family 
Prophets of Deceit 

ABOUT 

CALENDAR 

NEWS & PUBLICATIONS 

LINKS 

Sophie Calle, Mohamed Camara, Hasan Elahi, Eyebeam R&D/Jonah Peretti & Michael Frumin, Kota Ezawa, Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher, Guthrie Lonergan, Jill Magid, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Trevor Paglen, Corinna Schnitt, Thomson & Craighead, Sharif Waked

Curated by Michael Connor

The New Normal explores the increasing exposure of the private sphere to public view, whether voluntary or involuntary. Each of these works was completed after October 2001, when former Vice President Dick Cheney described new government surveillance measures following September 11 as “the new normalcy.” At the same time telephones were tapped and airline passengers were exhaustively searched, the public began willingly to document and share online intimate aspects of daily life, for convenience and community.

Personal information has become a readily available raw material. In response to this shift, many of the artists featured in The New Normal have used other people’s private information and images—home videos, financial data, leaked documents—as the basis of their work. By doing so, they offer disconcerting glimpses into the lives of neighbors, strangers, and celebrities, while making visible the social and aesthetic conventions that lie behind these disclosures. Other artists in the exhibition adopt self-disclosure as a strategy, one that seemingly conflicts with the need for privacy. They reveal their own bodies, their consumer habits, and their domestic spaces. For some of them, this reflects the social desire to build intimacy; for others, it is framed as a gesture of defiance in response to the intrusiveness of surveillance.

Comprehensively, the works in The New Normal suggest that access to private information is a currency whose circulation is growing and evolving. We may find this exchange both frightening and fascinating, but we are inescapably complicit in its perpetuation.

The New Normal is a traveling exhibition co-organized by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York and Artists Space, New York, and circulated by iCI.



Exhibition website

View interview with Michael Connor at Artists Space YouTube page

Publication

Sponsors

Did you experience this exhibition? If so, please tell us what you think.

Sophie Calle, Unfinished, 2005
single-channel video projection with sound, 30 minutes 14 seconds
courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
----------------------------------------------
↑ 

Mohamed Camara, Les Rideaux de Mohamed (The Curtains of Mohamed), 2004
single-channel video without sound, 65 minutes
courtesy of the artist and Galerie Pierre Brullé, Paris
----------------------------------------------
↑