Cover image of the review
Title image: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, _Conflicted Phonemes_ 2012, vinyl wall display, shelf, printed material, Installation view, Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, 2018, Courtesy of the artist, Maureen Paley Gallery, London and Mor Charpentier Gallery, Paris, Photograph: Christian Capurro.)

Eavesdropping


13 Oct 2018
18 Feb - 18 Feb 2020

Double Issue

This week Memo Review publishes two reviews of two major exhibitions currently open at the Ian Potter Museum of Art: State of the Union and Eavesdropping.

Below Sophie Knezic considers the social and political stakes of the question of sound, surveillance and listening in Eavesdropping.

Benison Kilby, whose review is available by clicking here, focuses on the problematics of artistic labour and trade unions in State of the Union.


Eavesdropping

Ian Potter Museum of Art

24 July – 28 October

By Sophie Knezic

The most iconic disciplinary schema brought to late 20th century philosophical attention would, without doubt, be the Panopticon; a model of surveillant architecture devised for the redesign of prisons at the end of the 18th century by the British reformist Jeremy Bentham. Almost 200 years later, Bentham's brutally efficient structure was positioned by Foucault in his study of the prison system as the reigning emblem of biopower; not just a landmark in the transformation of Western penal architecture but a diagram of the new economy of internalised self-disciplinary and self-surveillant rule.

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