Trevor Paglen

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Trevor Paglen at the South by Southwest Film Festival 2019

Trevor Paglen (* 1974 in Maryland ) is an American photo artist, author and activist of the political left, whose work mainly deals with the military and intelligence services of the USA.

Life

After studying religious studies and composition at the University of California, Berkeley, and studying art and technology at the School of Art in Chicago , Paglen earned his doctorate in geography with a focus on new media in 2008 . Since then he has been teaching at the University of California . He has been awarded numerous prizes and takes part in international solo and group exhibitions, lectures and public projects.

In 2008, the Berkeley Art Museum dedicated an extensive solo exhibition to him. A year later Paglen took part in the Istanbul Biennale ; In 2010 he exhibited at the Vienna Secession .

Trevor Paglen lives and works in New York City .

Work and reception

In his work Paglen investigates phenomena that are subject to secrecy and whose existence is supposed to remain hidden from the public . In his pictures he documents, among other things, secret bases of the American secret services CIA and NSA as well as the military, spy satellites in the night sky, or secret service activities .

Trevor Paglen's astrophotographs show spacecraft against a backdrop of stars and star nebulae. For this project he used the observations of an international network of satellite observers. With the help of computer scientists , he developed software that can display the orbital movements of the secret spacecraft.

His photographs of secret military installations are also made with the aid of astronomical instruments. The inaccessible systems are largely cordoned off and are located in uninhabited areas. Paglen's recordings are made using precision telescopes , which are equipped with strong focal lengths and take the viewer to the limits of vision. Paglen's work is characterized by the interplay between secrecy and disclosure, evidence and abstraction. The artist does not want to see them as "evidence" but as a means of attracting attention.

On the occasion of an exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in spring 2015, Paglen called for a competition to photograph secret service systems in Germany.

In 2015, he used a piece of trinitite , an artificial glass that accidentally formed from molten sand during the first atomic explosion in 1945 on a military training and testing site in the US state of New Mexico , inside his work of art Trinity Cube . The exterior of the artwork is made of glass that was melted during the Fukushima nuclear disaster . Paglen formed a 20 × 20 cm cube from these two components, which he set up in the Fukushima exclusion zone as part of the Don't Follow the Wind exhibition . Only after the exclusion zone has been lifted at an indefinite future time will the work of art be publicly accessible there; until then you can only look at it in photographs.

In 2018 he initiated the space art work Orbital Reflector , which will orbit the earth as a satellite for about two months from October and appear like a bright, moving star in the night sky.

Prizes and awards

Fonts (selection)

  • Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights , Icon Books Ltd, 2007, ISBN 978-1840468304 .
  • Blank Spots on the Map: the Secret Geography of the Pentagon's Black World . New York, 2009, ISBN 978-0451229168 .
  • A Compendium of Secrets , exhib.-cat., Ed. v. Ute Riese and Kunsthalle Gießen, 2010.
  • I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me: Emblems from the Pentagon's Black World , Melville House, 2010, ISBN 978-1935554141 .
  • Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes , Text: Rebecca Solnit . Aperture Foundation, 2010, ISBN 978-1-597111300 .
  • The Last Pictures , University of California Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0520275003 .

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 2008 The Other Night Sky , Berkeley Art Museum.
  • 2009 A Compendium of Secrets , Cologne.
  • 2011 A Hidden Landscape , Aksioma, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
  • 2012/2013 The Last Pictures , New York.
  • 2014: Joint exhibition Smart New World , among others with Kenneth Goldsmith , Kunsthalle Düsseldorf .
  • 2015: The Octopus , Frankfurter Kunstverein , Frankfurt am Main.
  • 2016: Group exhibition : L'Image volée , here Americas II, Bahamas Internet Cable System (BICS-1) and Globenet , Fondazione Prada , Milan.

Web links

Commons : Free works by Trevor Paglen  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gallery Zander
  2. ^ Art in America, April 29, 2013
  3. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 6, 2013
  4. ^ Eagle-Eye Photo Contest: Landscapes of Surveillance , photocontest-eagle-eye.org
  5. ↑ Tiernan Morgan: Art Movements , October 2, 2015, hyperallergic.com, accessed on July 2, 2016. (English, with photo of the work of art)
  6. ↑ Trinity Cube on Trevor Paglen's website , paglen.com, accessed on July 2, 2016. (English, with photo of the work of art)
  7. ↑ Ulrich Woelk in conversation with Dieter Kassel: Art in Space: A brilliant idea - or just space junk? In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . September 6, 2018 ( deutschlandfunkkultur.de [accessed September 6, 2018]).
  8. ↑ Trevor Paglen, 43, artist and geographer living in Berlin , NPR of October 11, 2017, accessed October 8, 2018
  9. ^ Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. November 15, 2018, accessed November 16, 2018 .
  10. ↑ News. Trevor Paglen Wins 2018 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. November 2, 2018, accessed November 16, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Take the pictures away from them again! in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on March 20, 2016, page 47
personal data
SURNAME Paglen, Trevor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer and writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Maryland