SEEN BY #17: Profiling

Today, we live in a media landscape where technology trains us to perform and ascribe personal and supposedly authentic meaning to any trackable and commodifiable action – we create profiles where we post our social life to Instagram, it is represented in images and their interrelations online, and all the while, its data is extracted and monetized by the same corporate platforms where it all plays out. On one hand, the creation of profiles, alternative avatars and the production or embellishment of identity has become normalized online; while on the other, the politicization of identity and its subsequent tokenization is at the center of cultural debates in Western society.

On the side of both the author and the spectator, the production of the profile is a central process and motif of contemporary social relations. While we may believe, we are in control of constructing the social media profiles to represent ourselves online, processes such as consumer or police profiling constructs representations of us modelled on the technological perception of our behavior. This polarity, between author and spectator persists in how we approach works of art and how artists today might think about how the meaning of their work is construed.

With works by Aisha Altenhofen & Felix Ansmann, Friederike Goebbels, Tara Habibzadeh, Samuel Haitz, Dana Rabea Jäger, Koob-Sassen Company, Jonas Kuck & Lukas Zerrahn, Katharina Michalsky, Miriam Wierzchoslawska.

A special exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in cooperation with the Universität der Künste Berlin

‍

Exhibition Series Seen By

Seen By #17 is part of the exhibition series Seen By, a joint project presented at the Museum für Fotografie and organized by the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Its aim is to rethink curatorial and artistic strategies for working with contemporary photography. More information: www.smb.museum/seenby

‍