press release
Unprincipled Passions
5 February–23 March 2002
This John Hansard Gallery exhibition brings together eight
international artists whose work examines the relationship between
public and private identities and the extent to which broadcast
and lens-based media cross from one sphere into the other. Bringing
together classic, recent and new film, video, sound and photographic
works by Vito Acconci, Sophie Calle, Frances Goodman, Philippine
Hoegen, Mako Idemitsu, Mark Lewis, Hayley Newman and Gillian
Wearing, the exhibition explores the potential for media-based
art to address issues of the personal, the confrontational,
the curious and the intrusive.
Unprincipled Passions focuses on the development of technology
and its increasingly intrusive relationship to the private sphere.
Advances in communication, broadcast and surveillance technologies
erode time and distance to provide the viewer with an immediate
gaze upon worldwide events such as the Gulf War and the collapse
of the World Trade Center. Society is increasingly torn between
increased surveillance for security and law enforcement, and
the apparently incompatible demand for the protection of privacy.
At the same time, technology has increasingly enabled the exploration
of the private, by, for example, the almost universal use of
the hand-held video camera and omnipresent CCTV. Contemporary
culture has driven the legitimisation of voyeurism by the growth
of victim television programmes like the confessional talk shows
hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer and reality television
programmes like “Big Brother”, in the interests
of entertainment. Unprincipled Passions offers a number of artists
who, on the one hand infiltrate this controversial territory
and, on the other, offer a critique.
A major international conference Unprincipled Passions: emotion
and modernity is timed to coincide with the exhibition. Following
on from two highly successful Critical Interventions events,
Evil and Obscene Powers, the Unprincipled Passions conference
seeks to examine the complex emotional ‘history’
of modernity and explores the redefinition of emotional life
in response to processes, systems and technologies that have
led to the increasing intrusion of non-coercive systems of power
into the private, public and cultural spheres.
