The images that open “Astro Noise,” Laura Poitras’s coming exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, are striking, pleasing, and at first impossible to decipher. One shows rows of horizontal stripes intersected by curved lines swooping down diagonally; another looks to be some kind of airborne vehicle with a burst of light, or explosion, in front of it; a third has the vague suggestion of sound waves across the canvas.
They’re meant to disorient. Nothing is what it seems in the exhibition by Ms. Poitras, the crusading journalist and filmmaker made famous (or notorious) by her association with the former government contractor Edward J. Snowden. Mr. Snowden’s decision to copy a trove of information about the inner workings of the surveillance apparatuses of the United States and Britain, and Ms. Poitras’s decision to help him, got them lauded as heroes and denounced as traitors by those who said they damaged national security.
To Ms. Poitras, the new project offers a different opportunity to make the same point. And using visual art, she believes, might help address the sort of public numbness brought on by the accrual of so many revelations about government overreach.
These pretty pictures, it turns out, were from the Snowden files and show descrambled images — from Israeli and Syrian drone feeds, among other sources — secretly intercepted a few years ago by the British in a program code-named “Anarchist.”
Ms. Poitras, 51, has of course already irritated the United States, its allies and some of its enemies by helping bring worldwide attention to the Snowden material through other media: newspaper articles for which she shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2014, and a documentary, “Citizenfour,” which won an Academy Award in 2015. (She also won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2012 — in all, an award hat trick so unusual that she may be the only person who has accomplished it.)
It seems dissonant at first to think of her embarking on what seems to be a left-field third act (a fourth act, if you count an earlier career in cooking). She has never had a solo art exhibition before and is not even represented by a gallery. But this new installation, using a mix of media, reflects the same sort of preoccupations that have fueled all of her work: government excess; the mass surveillance of citizens; the use of drones; the paranoia that she says has driven so much intelligence policy since 9/11; the long arm of what Ms. Poitras calls the “deep state,” meaning, she said in an interview, “the hidden state, the one we don’t elect.”
It was early in January, and she was at her studio in TriBeCa, surrounded by her very busy production team and racing against the clock to make various Whitney deadlines. The exhibition, opening Feb. 5, takes up the entire eighth floor, with five separate pieces comprising videos, written materials and photographs from the Snowden files and other sources, including government documents about surveillance of Ms. Poitras that she procured only after suing the government for their release.
She tends to work furiously and long into the night, tweaking her material until the last minute while battling the nagging fear that she’s left it too late. It’s impossible for her to leave her work aside; beyond that, she said, “My personal life is personal.”
She answers most questions earnestly and thoroughly, rarely providing a simple response when a more nuanced one is possible. She seems by this point almost unshockable about the way the intelligence world works.
When she talks, for instance, about how she was detained, interrogated and searched dozens of times at airports in the United States and abroad between 2006 and 2012, following a film she made about the Iraq war, she sounds not so much affronted as curious and outraged on a civic level, almost as if she’s talking about things that happened to someone else.
She has always seen herself as more a visual journalist than a print one, she said, and views “Astro Noise” as a natural extension of her work in the last 15 years, since the Sept. 11 attacks, the American invasion of Iraq and the opening of the Guantánamo Bay prison changed her focus. She’d already left behind her earlier career, as a chef specializing in French cuisine in San Francisco. Inspired by film classes she’d taken at the San Francisco Art Institute, she had shifted to cinéma-vérité filmmaking — documenting events unfolding in real time.
She was filled with outrage by what happened after 9/11. “I felt like, as an artist, I wanted to say something,” she said. “I wanted to express something that I felt I wasn’t seeing, that was more on a human scale. I also felt that as a country we were making decisions that were really frightening.”
She traveled to Iraq for eight months in 2004 and 2005 and eventually made two acclaimed films: “My Country, My Country,” about the Iraq war as told from the point of view of an Iraqi doctor; and “The Oath,” about two former aides to Osama bin Laden, one who ends up a prisoner in Guantánamo Bay, the other who becomes a taxi driver in Yemen. She was made a MacArthur fellow in 2012, the same year she was invited to participate in the film program of the Whitney Biennial. She has also written for The New York Times.
At the Biennial, she organized a “surveillance teach-in” in which William Binney, a National Security Agency whistle-blower, spoke onstage with the hacker and computersecurity expert Jacob Appelbaum. But she added other elements, including enlisting a group of performance artists to act as a security force that temporarily detained museumgoers attempting to enter the event and brought a sense of random menace to the experience.
The next year, Ms. Poitras was working on “Citizenfour,” the third in her post-9/11 documentary series. Its focus changed drastically when Ms. Poitras was contacted by Mr. Snowden, who admired her work, and began to collaborate with him and to film him; he became the subject of the movie. She moved to Berlin — she was not even sure she’d be allowed back into the United States — but knew that her next work would be some sort of installation project.
“One of your missions as a museum is to create a platform for artists who make socially conscious art, who are compelled to deal with social and political issues,” he said, using some of the current art-world tropes. “We felt that Laura was an original, strong and compelling voice in all that.”
The show has required an intense collaboration with the Whitney but also with the other members of Ms. Poitras’s team, who work in intimate quarters in the TriBeCa studio, putting together the pieces, editing and handling the visual effects for the video elements and the like.
The five pieces can each stand individually but are meant to be experienced in order, as a progression. “Hopefully you’ll leave with a different mind-set than when you started,” Ms. Poitras said.
The pieces are designed to provoke, to make points sideways rather than head-on.
In one installation, two videos run concurrently, the first showing footage taken by Ms. Poitras at ground zero shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the other showing two suspects being interrogated by the American military in Afghanistan. The works are viscerally affecting, forcing the viewer to think about the way one wrong can lead to another, about what people do in the name of freedom.
“Disposition Matrix” is the largest piece in the exhibition, consisting of 20 boxes with slits on the sides that, in a darkened room, may seem like portals to tiny rooms containing videos, documents and other material. (The title is taken from a military term depicting a targeting list of terrorism suspects.)
In the exhibition, visitors can listen to a harrowing interview in which a Turkish citizen describes his experiences as a prisoner of American forces in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. They can wander into a room in which they unwittingly become part of the piece on display.
And they can see some of the (heavily redacted) documents detailing the surveillance of Ms. Poitras.
Their arrival has brought mixed feelings. From a personal point of view, she said in a post-interview email message, the documents have helped piece together nagging questions about her own history. “My experiences at the border were pretty aggressive and invasive, so to see beyond the scenes gives a kind of resolution,” she said. (Though those interrogations have stopped, she has never been formally contacted by the government about the surveillance, she said, and does not know whether it has officially ended.)
And while it was “not pleasant” to learn the extent of the investigation against her — a grand jury investigation, the monitoring of her address — it was also exciting, in its way. “From an artistic perspective, I was thrilled to read the documents,” she said. “It is great material to work with.”
Ms. Poitras is on the staff of the online magazine The Intercept, which she helped found; an article by a colleague will run concurrently with her Whitney exhibit. She’s one of several people producing a series of short-form documentaries, and is also working on a series of short films about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
She’s also found her way into popular culture: An activist character in Berlin in the most recent season of “Homeland” appears to have been based on her. She said that watching it was a bit surreal, but that she has “a healthy ability to separate fact from fiction.”
In any case, she said, the show was Islamophobic and unfairly showcased unstable female characters, in any case. After some graffiti artists hired to add authenticity to a Syrian refugee-camp set scrawled messages in Arabic declaring the show “racist,” Intercept commissioned a film by one of them, criticizing the series.
(A Showtime representative said: “We respect Ms. Poitras’s freedom to interpret the show however she chooses to interpret it.”)
Whether viewers at the Whitney will see her work as naïvely polemical or genuinely affecting will soon become clear. But Ms. Poitras intends the installation to allow audiences to become engaged in a new way with her ideas and the material.
“News stories don’t satisfy on a human level,” she said. “We know that Guantánamo is still open, but do we really know what that means? The idea is to experience an emotional understanding, so it’s not just an intellectual abstraction.”
She added: “So many shocking things have been released, and what’s surprising is how little anything actually shocks people.”
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